


The Little Wing

by icameherejusttosaythis



Category: Mass Effect, Mass Effect 2 - Fandom, Mass Effect 3 - Fandom, Mass Effect Posthistory - Fandom, Mass Effect Prehistory - Fandom
Genre: Asari - Freeform, Citadel-freeform, F/F, Gen, Mass Effect - Freeform, Mass Effect Posthistory, Mass Effect Prehistory, Mass Relay, Protheans - Freeform, Reapers, Space Exploration, Terminus Systems, omega - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-09
Updated: 2014-12-05
Packaged: 2018-01-04 04:10:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 26
Words: 99,664
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1076378
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/icameherejusttosaythis/pseuds/icameherejusttosaythis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Nixia, a small asari research vessel, discovers a massive alien structure orbiting beyond Tevura, the outermost planet in their system. Faced with an unknown danger, the largely civilian crew and military security team find themselves forced to work together in ways they'd never thought possible, in order to survive.   </p>
<p>Meanwhile, Liara traces the origins of a horrific parasitic infestation, while trying to follow a series of clues left behind for her by her mother, Benezia. </p>
<p>Feel free to share your thoughts or comments.</p>
<p>Now edited to eliminate a few typos and for added clarity.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Little Wing

 

 

            Wake the captain.

            This was her first thought as sensors reported an unidentified contact, but she waited. Essa wanted to know more.

            “What can we see?” she said.

            From her station, the sensors operator projected the contact data onto the screens at the flight deck’s left chair so she could look for herself. Essa cycled through the different arrays: visible light, infrared, radio, electromagnetic, x-ray, gravitational interference, particle detector. Visible light showed almost nothing. The others showed less, except that the contact was sitting at the bottom of a comparatively massive gravity well. The object itself was small. Perhaps it was just a previously unnoticed asteroid.

            “We’re sure it’s not the probe?” Essa said.

            “Too much mass,” Sensors said.

            Essa thought another moment. “Distance.”

            “Five million kilometers. Holding steady. It appears we are on parallel vectors.”

            “Right.” She held her breath then said, “Wake the captain.”

#

            Twenty minutes earlier, the galley steward had brought up the mid-watch meal, pouches full of hot soup, tea, and the last of the ship’s stores of fresh fruit. Essa had let the rest of the flight deck eat, while watching the stars rising over Tevura’s night-dark upper limb. Auroras bloomed at the ice giant’s northern pole. When it was her turn to eat, Essa counted three of Tevura’s larger satellites rising behind the planet’s narrow band of rings.

            Beyond the spectacular view, third watch would likely be quiet. Never much to do, this time of night, aside from monitor the incoming radio traffic relayed—and more than two hours old by the time it reached them—from High Rock, and give the instruments an occasional scan to make sure everything was functioning properly.

            They had been in Tevura’s orbit for twenty days. Before that, they had made the fifteen-day journey from High Rock, a new installation still under construction on the largest of Parintha’s asteroid. Half research station, half military base, it was becoming a formidable structure, the asteroid a virtual warren of tunnels and subsurface galleries, long range sensors, and all manner of antennae probing the darkness for who knew what. On the shuttle craft that had deposited them at High Rock, Essa had watched a battalion strength unit executing low-gravity maneuvers. Gearing for war, she thought, but with whom?

            Ever since their arrival they’d been running a burn-and-drift pattern. Long, accelerations that slung them out on a high, elliptical path toward the far edge of the system, until the planet’s gravity dragged them systemward again. At apogee, Parnitha looked almost as far away as all the other visible stars, but as Tevura reeled them back in, on their close pass, Essa could distinguish clearly between individual cloud tops, and count impact craters on the outer face of the innermost moon. All the while, they waited for the FTL probe that had departed three years ago on a mission to Orisoni, the star closest to Thessia’s parent star Parnitha, to return.

            It was ten days overdue, though this wasn’t unexpected. The probe’s automated systems were tuned to optimize speed and fuel consumption. And, of course, there were no instruments to accurately measure its speed. No, the probe would keep its own schedule. There was no reason to think it had failed. And the _Nixia_ would be relieved from her vigil by her sister ship, the _Desinna_ , in a few short days. 

            And so Essa concentrated on correcting the slight rotation that was making the _Nixia_ gently tilt its nose toward Tevura. Perhaps if she hadn’t righted the ship at exactly that moment the sensors operator wouldn’t have spotted the contact.

            Now Essa cycled through the different displays, each one showing a slightly different view of the elliptical bubble of space that lay before them. She tried the visible light telescope again. It showed nothing—almost nothing. The stars appeared to change behind the object as it transited across them. The contact was moving, she thought, but that was all she had time to realize before the captain emerged onto the flight deck. She was awake, her demeanor and uniform showing no sign of having been roused from sleep. Essa watched as she pulled herself across the open space to the sensor operator’s station.

            “What can we see?” she said.

            Essa observed the captain going through the same thought process she had a few moments earlier. The captain righted herself, and pushed across the cabin to the flight deck’s left chair.

            “First officer,” she said. “You stand relieved.”

            Essa began to speak.

            “You’re relieved, Lieutenant,” the captain said, more firmly this time. Essa blushed, and ground her teeth, but did as she was told. The two other crew on the flight deck watched her unbuckle from her harness and push herself across the cabin to the hatch. The navigator and sensors operator each gave a salute. She left the bridge without another word.

#

            Down the long companionway that separated the bridge from the other decks of the ship, and wondering why she’d been dismissed, Essa arrived on the crew deck, lights dimmed and the usually noisy area empty at this hour of the watch. Ten crew members were asleep in bags strapped to the bulkheads, some pointing head-up, others head-down, depending on what was available. An unsecured drinking pouch hovered in the center of the room. Only the captain had a semi-private space, in a niche hidden behind the galley. At the moment, all the bags were full, as most of the crew kept to the same day-night cycle as the staff at High Rock. Essa and the rest of the third watch crew took any bag that was available when they were relieved in the morning, and perhaps because of this had grown accustomed to sleeping through all manner of noise.

            But Essa suddenly wasn’t thinking about a warm bed. Instead she let herself drift to the hatch to the deck below, opened the companionway and continued aft in the direction of the labs.

            The _Nixia_ had taken on an extra dozen crewmembers at High Rock, two additional science officers and a “security team”—their purpose a mystery to her and the rest of the crew—who all kept to themselves in the hold below, the hatch barred from the aft side. The scientists were working on something down there, something noisy, the sound of their work traveling up through the struts that braced the hull. And the security team kept silent, sitting together and not talking to anyone at mealtimes, not even each other. Their uniforms bore no insignia, not for rank, or specialization identifiers. Not even their names.

            The captain didn’t discuss their purpose, and Essa knew better than to ask why their leader wore the black double-chevron shoulder patches of the Serrice Guards.

            A generation ago a Guards commander might have sparked more interest with the crew than it did now. At one time in the relatively recent past the Guards had been the enemy, the elite of the Serrice military, back when they’d had fought against Armali and an alliance of smaller republics.

Respected. Feared. Hated. All those applied. It was rumored that a single team of Guards had assassinated three Armali matriarchs, in three separate locations, all on the same day. The war had eventually gone from hot to cold, had become a score settled through proxy conflicts—worker uprisings, mostly, the kind of unrest that blossomed readily in the poor working conditions of the offworld mining colonies founded in the asteroid belt and in the orbital shipyards being constructed over Thessia.   

            The Guards’ commander was old enough to remember the conflict. She had a coil burn down her right arm, a reminder of the plasma torch that she’d once worn. She’d been a breacher during the war, one who made entry points for their comrades, cutting holes in the walls of buildings, or the hulls of spacecraft. The tubes that directed the hot gas to a nozzle on the operator’s wrist were notorious for their poor heat shielding. Often enough they would injure or—especially in the vacuum of space—kill an operator who let it burn for too long.

            Even so, the coil-scar that the commander liked to show off, always leaving the sleeves of her jumpsuit rolled to keep it in view, appeared to draw little attention from the _Nixia’s_ young crew. The _Nixia_ —named after a small, swift predatory bird, known commonly as the “little wing”—was a maiden vessel. Most of her crew was well under two hundred years old. The youngest were on their first postings out of the academy. They had all studied the history of the centuries-long conflict between Serrice and the republics, but none but their captain had lived through any of it. That had been a long time ago. Stories their mothers might whisper among themselves, but never let trouble their daughters.

            And now, peace between the republics. That was the era they lived in, the era most of the young crew had been born into: rapid scientific advancement, economic prosperity, expansion beyond geostationary orbit. The asari had, in the past fifty years, ascended from their homeworld of Thessia and were spreading throughout the system, establishing orbital stations around the gas giants Jainiri and Athame. That an old soldier was on boaard, a former enemy of many of the crew, should have seemed like a sign of continued progress. Or at least it would have, if the commander and her team weren’t always locking themselves in the cargo bay, only coming up for meals, or to access the main airlock for live fire drills on the outside of the hull.

            The regular crew all wore the green uniform patches that identified them as members of the peacetime scientific corps. None of them seemed that troubled by the commandos, though some asked why they had come. When asked, Essa told her crew to mind their business and focus on their work, advice she told herself to follow as she let herself drift down the passageway to the astronomy lab. On the way down to the science deck, she’d got the idea to access the more powerful telescope in the observatory.

            She arrived at the terminal and buckled herself into the observatory’s chair before she began running the search program that would help her aim the telescope toward the object.

            “You won’t be able to see it from here.”

            Essa jumped hearing the voice behind her. She turned to see the leader of the Serrice Guards hanging from one of the ladder-rungs mounted here and there to allow the crew to maneuver in microgravity.

            Essa allowed herself to catch her breath before she said, “Goddess, you frightened me.”

            The commander smiled, though for her even this gesture seemed hostile. Even with only dim light from the outer passageway Essa could easily make out the scar on her arm. Perhaps she was staring.

            The commander glanced at her arm, too, before moving closer. “You haven’t even asked how I know.”

            Essa blinked, wondering what was coming next, and whether she could unstrap herself quickly enough to get free if there was some kind of confrontation. “I’m not sure what you’re saying,” she said.

            “Ask me then. How do I know what you’re looking for?”

            “I don’t,” Essa said.

            There was a pause. The commander moved closer. Even if Essa tried to escape now, she gathered she wouldn’t be able. The commander stared hard then said, “You’ve been relieved from the watch, yes?”

            Essa agreed that she had.

            “I know that because third watch is yours. You should be running the ship.”

            All this time she was coming closer. Now her hand, her menacingly strong grip, was on Essa’s shoulder.

            “Do you know who I am?” the commander said.

            “No one does. You or any of your—your foot soldiers.” Essa bore down on the word _foot_ , hoping the commander might take offense. The commander, unfazed, held out her hand. A little blue light, not unlike a flame, appeared in her palm, flickered and disappeared. A threat, Essa imagined. Her free hand reached to unlatch the straps of her seat. The commander pushed her back down into the seat.  

            “In my business, no one likes it when people go spying where they shouldn’t.”

            “Business?” Essa said. “You’re a killer.”

            “In my day, I was.” She let Essa go, at the same time allowing herself to drift back against the bulkhead. “Now—now, I listen, and I watch. We may be at peace, but threats are everywhere.” The way she turned her gaze, she seemed to be searching for the object, too, that was floating out there, just beyond their sight. “This object. Perhaps.”

             Essa blinked at her in the dark. The commander slowly drifted toward the ceiling. Let her try to frighten me again, she thought. Let her see what a green-patch can do. Perhaps the commander sensed this. Perhaps this was simply how she greeted everyone. Now she held out her hand, scarred flesh and all for Essa to take.

             “I’m First Commandant Amair Razia, Serrice High Command, intelligence section.”

             They shook hands. Razia’s scar seemed to leave an impression on Essa’s palm.

             “I’d ask why you’re on my ship,” Essa said.

             “Be patient,” Razia said. “Your mission and mine are about to converge.”

             With that she withdrew to the bulkhead on the far side of the compartment, hovering there, her hands braced against the padded ceiling. Essa stared again at the display, the search program having run its course showed no results, aside from the expected objects. Cryo-volcanoes on Tevura’s third moon were jetting a plume of ice crystals a hundred kilometers high. Essa tried again.

“You won’t find it,” Razia said again. “What do you think I was doing up here?”

Essa shook her head. She should have known. She was about to say something, when an automated voice called out, “All hands. All hands. Secure for acceleration. Secure for acceleration. Three minutes. Sound off.”

            Essa heard the crew beginning to clamber out of their bags, and individual crewmembers began reporting in over the open channel. _Navigation secure. Sensors secure. Galley crew secure._ She buckled herself back into the astronomy station. Razia did the same in a seat nearby. She pressed a key on the wrist of her jumpsuit, saying “XO secure.”

            The automated voice sounded again. “All hands. All hands reporting secure. Countdown to acceleration in five, four…”

            The engines kicked in, a hollow roar that shook the bulkheads and seemed to go on forever. She felt the force of the acceleration pulling at her face, her limbs and breasts. Equipment stowed in nearby drawers began to rattle. Essa watched as Commander Razia pulled a ration strip from the shoulder pouch of her uniform and casually chewed it as the burn went on. Five million kilometers and holding steady, Essa thought. A long distance to cover, even in space. When at last the engines stopped the ship grew quiet, unnerving after all the noise. There were a few more pops and bangs from the maneuvering thrusters, then the automated voice signaled the all clear. Essa undid the straps on her seat and let herself drift out into the center of the room. Razia followed her. Over her earpiece, she hear the captain call in, “XO report in for your mission briefing. On the double.”

            “Yes, ma’am.”

            Razia pushed her way through the hatch before her then reached out to pull Essa through.  “You want to know what we’ve found?” she said. “Come with me and let’s find out.”

 

 


	2. In Shepard's Field

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is the second timeline that follows Liara in the present day universe, though we meet up with her some two hundred years after the reaper invasion. In this chapter, she is visiting Earth, when she receives some unsettling news.

Liara was standing at the edge of the meadow in the sunlight. On three sides, mountains, but in front of her, a long view down into the foothills, and the flat plains beyond, quilted with farms. Alpine flowers, tiny things no bigger than a fingernail, were blooming despite the wind racing down the cliffs to the west. She tucked her hands into the pockets of her coat and walked a little way ahead to where a small group of standing stones were arranged, as though guarding the entry.

  
“Where are we?” Shepard said.

  
“Earth, this time,” Liara said. Shepard was behind her, as always, trailing, as though not wanting to be seen. “We’re in Shepard’s Field.”

  
“Right,” Shepard said.

  
Liara kept going. Enjoying the spring of grass and dirt beneath her feet. How long had it been since she’d stood on ground where something was growing? Weeks at least. A month sounded more like it. Shipbound, Citadelbound. It all amounted to the same thing. Confinement.

  
“Coming here is exactly what I needed,” she said.

  
“And this,” Shepard said, “is why I think you’re sentimental.”

  
Liara smiled, turning, but Shepard had moved away, somehow managing to slip just out of view.

  
Overhead there was a thin wail of something passing overhead. Looking up, Liara saw a faint contrail, and then a puff of vapor whose appearance was punctuated by a distant bursting sound. Every spring, the Earth passed through a debris field. Astronomers called it the Hammer Field, after the name Admiral Hackett had given the naval operation that had ended the reaper war. The battle had raged for hours, thousands of ships torn apart, leaving behind countless unrecovered dead of every race. Salvage fleets had done what they could, towing the dangerously large hulls and hull fragments to a safe orbits in the asteroid belt, and lining up any destroyed reaper hulks on a collision course with the sun. An uncountable number fragments remained, some of it dangerous. Unexploded munitions, unstable fuel, radioactive materials. And mixed in with that, thousands upon thousands of bodies. All of that high velocity debris had coalesced over the years into a cluster of objects in a predictable orbit around the sun, one that crossed the Earth’s path every year, in early May.

  
“This place isn’t just for you,” Liara said, finding Shepard, back turned, squatting down to pick flowers. “It’s for all the lost and missing. Almost every inhabited planet has one.”

  
“I told you not to let them use me like this,” Shepard said. “Make me into a cult or a legend.”

  
“It’s just easier to use your name,” Liara said. “In the past, families of the dead would come here. They could say their loved ones were here.”

  
“I suppose that’s better than the truth.” Shepard walked toward the first rank of standings tones, reaching out to touch one. “It’s been a long time, Liara. Too long to hold on to a memory.”

  
Liara was quiet for a while. She walked farther out into the meadow. It stretched on for a good distance, perhaps a kilometer or more, until the plateau where they stood dropped sharply away to the valley below.

  
“Memories aren’t just ghosts,” she said. She remembered the moment she’d shared with Shepard before the final push, her final moments with the commander, as it turned out. “Not for the asari. They are physical things.”

  
“Touch me, then.”

  
Liara reached out, but then caught herself. “Imagine a book,” she said. “I can’t touch the people in it, but I’ll always know where it is. And if it means enough to me, I’ll carry it wherever I go. And so the people in it travel with me. I take them along.”

  
“So I’m a metaphor.”

  
“Better than being a ghost.”

  
Shepard nodded. It did seem a better explanation. “Still, Liara. It’s been years.”

  
“Two hundred and seven,” she said.

  
“All the people who came here to mourn their lost—they’re long gone, too.”

  
“A war like that leaves wounds even later generations will feel.”

  
“I think it’s time to let go,” Shepard said. “Of me.”

  
“I would, Shepard. But love doesn’t die with the body. Not yours. Not mine.”

  
“At least put me back on the shelf,” Shepard said. “Find someone, Liara. That’s an order.”

  
“If I remember correctly, I was never officially part of your chain of command.” Shepard bristled and Liara laughed and gave a mock salute. “I haven’t been lonely,” she said, but was it even true? She shook her head, and forced her eyes shut. The image of Shepard disappeared. When she opened her eyes again her only company in the meadow was the sunlight.

  
There was another group of standing stones toward the center of the meadow, and Liara, beyond all reason, was determined to make it there before the cold drove her back.

  
As she went a light flashed on her wrist and a small holographic screen opened out for her to view.

  
“Yes?” she said. The person at the other end was an old contact from her Shadow Broker days, a krogan who had done a little wetwork for her here and there. She’d only ever known him as Arclight. It took her a moment to realize she was watching a pre-recorded transmission. He was wearing body armor, but the chestplate looked to have been ripped open by at least one close-range strike. One of his eyes was swollen shut, and orange blood leaked from a gash on his chin.

  
“Doctor T’Soni,” he said. His voice was always a low roar, but now he was shouting over a wall of noise behind him. After a moment, the sound resolved into small arms fire. “You need to see this.”

  
The camera angle changed, and followed Arclight as he moved through a door into a windowless room, where three dead bodies—two asari, one human, all shot through the head—had been dragged and lined up against the wall. She wasn’t sure what he was trying to show her.

  
“Give me some light,” he said, then reached down and tore open the uniform of the first one, revealing some kind implanted device, tubes growing through the skin of the chest, winding their way through the ribs.

  
Arclight stood and looked at the camera. “I don’t know what these things are,” he said. “We’ve only seen a few, but I’m betting its something you’ll want to know about.” After a pause he said, “It’s not likely we’ll make it out of here. It doesn’t matter. I already dispatched a messenger yesterday with one of these things in a body bag. She’ll meet your contact tomorrow at one of the usual spots. Make sure your person isn’t late.”

  
There was a terrible ripping sound, and the wall behind Arclight disappeared. Orange flame roared behind him, the image stuttered momentarily, and then through the dust Liara saw a beautiful dawn sky through the opening.

  
“All right then,” Arclight shouted to his remaining troops. “Back to work!” Much more quietly, in a voice that didn’t at all sound like him, he looked directly at the camera again, and said, “Good luck, doctor.”

  
The transmission ended. A timestamp indicated that it was already ten hours old. Best to get in touch with her former associate as soon as she could.

  
#

  
An hour later, Liara, having descended the path from Shepard’s field to the shuttle that would return her to the spaceport, was still wondering to make of Arclight’s information. She had broken the footage of the bodies down into still images, though they showed her almost as little as the grainy video. Her first thought was to discard the transmission, board her ship, and find a remote world somewhere beyond the relays, where she could simply disappear and never have to suffer the consequences for having been who she once was.

  
Liara had long ago put information trading behind her. Once the Illusive Man had found out who she was, how much longer could it take other organizations to connect the dots? Even the broken down communication network, the decades of political uncertainty and social chaos that followed only provided a temporary buffer from those who wanted to harm her. The asari live long lives, but the organizations she’d worked against had long memories. No matter how she might try to insulate herself, in the end there had been nothing to do but expose the network—at least partially—to as many different agencies as she could. Now that it was out in the open, the Shadow Broker’s networks had collapsed. Some agents had been killed or imprisoned, others had gone into hiding. Many more had simply gone on with their lives, being too important for simple disposal—a word she herself had used to describe having an enemy disappear. Liara was one of those who was too important to kill.

  
The greatest criminals, she thought, are not the ones who evade capture the longest, but the ones who transcend the law, redefining what was once criminal activity as lawful conduct. That was Doctor Liara T’Soni’s penitence, knowing what she’d done and being allowed to live long enough to see the consequences. But she was young, still. She could do some good.

  
Now she advised the asari delegation to the Citadel Council on matters of state security. They would want to know about these findings.

  
She looked at the images again, while making notes. Biomechanical grafting. Nanomolecular implantation. Cerberus activity. Reaper technology. She looked at the list and caught herself. Had she really written these things down? The shuttle banked over the spaceport, and soon she was climbing the ramp to her ship: small, but comfortable, and crewed by people Liara knew she could trust. Her first stop was the cockpit. She found the pilot there, already going through her preflight routine.

  
“Are we ready, Alera?” Liara said.

  
“Just give me our destination.” Alera’s hands hovered over the controls.

  
“The Citadel. We have business there.”


	3. Mission Briefing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> On the Nixia, the crew prepares for their encounter with the object discovered earlier.

 

Almost the entire crew, save the second mate, and the other flight deck officers, had assembled in the mess by the time Essa and Razia arrived. They hadn’t had far to go. Now the captain was braced against the padded ceiling. The screen attached to the bulkhead behind her that usually displayed whatever the observatory’s telescope was investigating instead showed readings from cockpit sensor array. Essa saw the same black shape transiting across a field of stars, though the outline of dark had a subtle curve to it now as it appeared to be catching some of Parnitha’s light, though still not enough to give her a sense of what it was.

 

Essa swam through the air to an open space where she would have a good view of the screen. The captain nodded at her, and began.

 

“During third watch, at approximately zero-three hundred standard time, our sensors detected an unidentified contact drifting somewhat beyond the orbit of Tevura.” There was a collective exclamation of surprise from the gathered crew. “At the time, we were on parallel courses, traveling at roughly the same velocity, at a distance of some five million kilometers. The contact is small enough that we may not have detected it at all, had it not been passing more or less directly in front of us.” Another wave of noise passed through the mess. “As per our mandate, we executed a seventeen-minute burn with the intent of bringing us level with the contact. We will decelerate appropriately in approximately five hours, at which time we expect to be level with the contact, at a lateral distance of one hundred kilometers.” The captain turned to face the screen. “As you can see, the object is not especially large, though its gravitational pull is significant. As you can see, as well, it has almost no albedo.” The captain put her hands together and nodded to the chief scientific officer, Dr. Neela T’Lanois. “Doctor.”

 

T’Lanois pushed herself from where she was seated and crossed over to the captain. She was small for an asari, thick through the body and limbs. She and Essa got along, though she seemed to enjoy antagonizing just about everyone else on board. Even she, though, seemed to understand that the commandos meant business, and went about her days apparently pretending they weren’t there.

 

All the same, it was odd, Essa thought, not to see her smile as she settled against the padding and, bracing herself, began to speak. “For those of you who know your local astronomy well enough, you might be thinking that this encounter was not entirely unexpected.” Rapt attention from the science team. The commandos, arrayed against the far side of the compartment looked unimpressed. She went on. “For those of you who know your local astronomy, we think that this object may be related to the Tevura anomaly.”

 

T’Lanois flipped the image—and now there it was, a little hint of a grin, she was excited after all—to show a diagram of Tevura’s outer ring. Observations showed, she was saying, that the ring had been changing since it was first discovered over two thousand years ago. The first images were drawings made by the land-based astronomers who had first observed the ring structures. These were historical documents, some of them with descriptive notes written in elaborate calligraphy, made at a time when even the most primitive imaging devices existed in only embryonic form. From these drawings T’Lanois moved to more recent photographs and even a few segments of video footage. From the time when the rings had been discovered to present day, she explained, Tevura’s rings had, they estimated, lost nearly half of one percent percent of their total mass. “That doesn’t seem like much,” she said, “But it accounts for nearly forty cubic kilometers of material.” She paused to let everyone digest that information, then added, “We have little indication as to where this material has gone.”

 

Roughly every two hundred years, she went on, observers had discovered that this outer ring, the Psi-Ring, appeared to grow a bulge that persisted for a few days, then disappeared, not to reappear. For centuries, scientists had suggested that there was an undiscovered seventh planet, or other celestial body that, on reaching orbital conjunction with Tevura, perturbed the Psi-Ring, stealing a small amount of material from it. Some had even gone so far as to project an orbital path of this object.

“In fact,” T’Lanois said, “Their calculations have proven to be extremely accurate. We observed the Tevura anomaly appear four days ago. The object we are seeing now passed between the planet and the _Nixia_ during our last orbital maneuver. Even so, if Lieutenant D’Erinia hadn’t aimed our sensors directly at it, we would not have encountered the object at all.”

 

There was a brief round of applause for Essa. Commandant Razia, who had slipped in behind her, clasped her shoulder again, and whispered, “Good work.” It was not a friendly gesture, as far as Essa could tell.

 

T’Lanois continued, “As you might imagine, our investigation of the anomaly is listed among the secondary mission parameters of the astronomy team, and as such we deemed it worthy of deviating from our primary capture mission.”

 

One from the probe-capture crew called out, “What if the probe returns while we are off track?”

 

Doctor T’Lanois looked at the floor and said, “We expect to be back on station within two days. If we miss the probe, our relief can catch up to it.” Protests from the capture team; T’Lanois ignored them.

 

More questions. While there was noise to cover her words, Essa turned to Razia and said, “Is this why you’re here?”

 

Razia cocked her head and smiled, every gesture a threat. “There you go. You’ve figured it out.”

 

When T’Lanois had finished, the captain again spoke. “We are currently four hours and twenty-eight minutes from deceleration. We expect rendezvous with our contact imminently afterward. Section heads prepare your teams. Flight deck, please remain. All other hands, dismissed.”

#

There was more information once they were in their private group. Essa was pleased to again be in the inner circle. With the rest of the crew gone below, Razia slipped over to the screen. She added three new images, two grainy and indistinct, and one final photograph showing an oblong structure that appeared to have a hole through the middle. Extending away from that opening were two long, arrow straight structures that looked like rails.

 

Essa had her feet attached to cloth loops in the floor. She said, “It’s an artificial structure.”

 

The captain and Razia exchanged a look.

 

“You knew?” Essa said. When the didn’t answer, she went on, “Where did this image come from?”

 

“Where do you think?” Razia said.

 

“Nothing’s been out this deep into the system.”

 

“Except—”

“Except for the probe itself,” Essa said, completing the captain’s sentence. “So this image was sent back three years ago?”

 

Razia nodded. Essa’s eyes grew wide. This mission had been in the works for a long time, then. Perhaps the probe wasn’t even their main priority. She thought: an alien-made object—proof of alien intelligence—at their doorstep. Then she remembered the military fortifications at High Rock.

 

How long had they known? And who knew? Why the secrecy?

 

Razia seemed to sense her curiosity. “You understand this is a high-level mission. Your selection for it was not a coincidence, but don’t make us regret picking you over another.”

 

How long had she herself been waiting to find such a thing? She floated closer to the screen and looked at Razia’s clearest image of the object again.

 

“Does anyone know what it is?” she said.

 

“No,” Razia said. “And that’s exactly why I’m here.”

 

“Serrice insisted,” the captain said. Essa sensed the imposition.

 

“The military doesn’t like unknowns,” Razia went on. “And you agree, this is an unknown, yes?”

 

The captain folded her arms under her breasts. If she agreed, she didn’t let on. She, too, had been a young pilot once, having claimed in a more jovial mood, on an earlier expedition, to have dropped bombs and strafed the line of advancing Serrans, during the final months of the war. But again, that had been a long time ago.

 

Razia spoke. “We think it might be a derelict ship,” she said, “But you can seen the dimensions. It’s more than fifteen kilometers long.”

 

“A warship, then?” the captain said.

 

“You don’t invest resources like that if you don’t plan to defend it. I wouldn’t.” Razia looked over at Essa, fixing her with her bloodthirsty gaze. “Perhaps its purpose isn’t only military, but it’s the size of a city. It’s valuable to someone. Therefore, we must assume if anyone is on board, they’re more than likely hostile.”

 

Essa was quiet. She wondered aloud how long it might have been out there.

 

“Centuries,” the captain said. “The discovery of the Tevura anomaly gives us a timeframe, but it’s a rough guess. Likely it’s been longer than that. Much longer.”

 

Essa only shook her head. Excitement, terror. Both mixed within her until she couldn’t tell one from the other. She wiped her mouth.

 

Razia said, “We’ll approach in the launch. Four of your science crew. Along with them, me and a small team. Armed. You will pilot us in the launch, while the _Nixia_ waits at a minimum safe distance of one hundred kilometers.”

 

Something inside Essa seemed to jump. She kept her face still, and said, “And then?”

Razia smiled again, but touched her coil-burn as though it still hurt. “We go inside. See who’s stirring, maybe turn on the lights, if we can.” She paused, then added, “That’s if all goes well.”

 

“And if it doesn’t,” the Captain said, “The lieutenant will be waiting for you with the engines warm, to make sure you can leave in a hurry if things go wrong.”


	4. Uniform Hotel

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Liara leaves earth for the Citadel.

Ascending through ten thousand meters the comm channel crackled and an Alliance controller said, “Uniform Hotel one seven seven, hold current vector for traffic.”

  
“Acknowledge, control,” Alera said. Her hands remained steady on the controls and the ship kept level. Up ahead a squadron of fighters, five groups of three, flying in tight delta formations, came tearing through the upper atmosphere, their angle of descent sharp, then angling up to reduce their speed. Some seconds later, there was a collective sonic boom, recorded by the ship’s external sensors and played back over the comms for Liara and Alera to hear.

  
“The Seventh Carrier group must be back from patrol,” Alera said. “Those are the markings on the fighters anyhow.”

  
Glad she’d decided to remain on the flight deck instead of retreating to her quarters, Liara looked out into the fading evening light. Their path was taking them over Europe. She had never seen Earth before the invasion, but she’d always believed Shepard who had told her how beautiful it once was. Before the invasion, Earth’s nightside was a lacework of gold city lights and darkness—oceans, wilderness. Now, the lights from many great population centers were gone: Paris, London, Berlin in particular had been rendered uninhabitable by the invasion. Gray wasteland had replaced green forests. The survivors had found themselves forced to move, and so tiny settlements were appearing here and there in the countryside, none of them bigger than ten or twenty thousand. It would have seemed the countryside couldn’t handle such an expansion, until one realized that perhaps as few as one in six humans on Earth had survived the war.

  
Liara had only known a postwar earth. Earth after London, after Hammer and Anvil, after Shepard disappeared into that beam, never to return. A blast of light from the Citadel put an end to the war. The reapers had stopped their attack. Some of them had seemed to simply give up, let their barriers drop, as though they were allowing themselves to be destroyed. But the full reaper fleet had never been accounted for. Reports of numerous ships of all sizes accelerating to FTL as the battle ended couldn’t be discounted. What had become of them was a question that had troubled Liara for two hundred years. There were billions of stars in the galaxy, thousands of inactive relays. They could be anywhere. And now Arclight and these bodies. What to make of those. Goddess, let them not be connected, Liara thought.

  
#

Liara remembered those years after the war, before the Charon relay had been repaired. In the days after the final battle, if it had indeed been final, the air had been thick with dust and soot. Every day, debris came thundering down from orbit. Most of it hit the ocean, leaving the seas a churning mass of whitecaps. Coastal cities flooded, washed away, were left abandoned.

At noon the sky was dark as a storm cloud, at night it was as black as a grave. Four years of darkness, four years of watching children play in icy mud. Four years of a cold sun that gave no warmth, and nights without stars. When it was clear, the moon appeared as a cold green disk through the ash. Plants vanished from the landscape.  
Liara remembered counting the days she was trapped on earth, under the black rain that fell on the shantytown of prefabricated housing where she and some of the other lucky “important” refugees lived. The krogan marines who’d borne the full force of the attack weren’t as fortunate, living in holes they’d dug in the rubble of London, worse even than Tuchanka they claimed. Liara had watched them scraping out an existence there. Almost all of the wounded would eventually die of infection.Of the ones that remained, half would join their comrades in the mass grave that had once been Hyde Park.

For the turians things went about the same. And the humans. And the asari. Fighters all, and heavily armed. How they had gone from the largest land army ever assembled to demobilized workforce spoke only to the respect they all bore for Shepard, who had sacrificed as much as they had, but who gave their suffering a public face. Liara had marveled at the turian and asari commandos who lined up docile as sheep every morning outside their camp to help clear rubble. There’d been enough debris to build a series of small mountains across what had once been a great city. In the centuries that had passed, they’d been covered with earth, and overgrown with grass and trees. Now families went there on weekends: Kite Hill, Westminster Hill, Queen’s Mount.

  
#

Four years of waiting before the first ship arrived from beyond the Charon relay, bearing news from the larger galaxy. Beyond the uncountable dead, when one read the reports there was still reason to hope. No planet, no colony had been spared, but many had survived. Everywhere there was talk of rebuilding.  
Even so, on earth the landscape was littered with toxic debris. From the cockpit, Liara could see craters dug by four crashed ships. The largest had become a circular lake four kilometers across, called Lac Colmar. Here and there were flickers of light, little towns. The Earth would come back.

  
Recovery was afoot, as it was everywhere, but Liara, aged three hundred and sixteen, saw the tragedy of a short-lived species. The generations after the war had lived their entire lives knowing nothing but scarcity and hardship. And now cities were returning, new metropolises budding on the coast: Brighton and Margate were both home to populations of over a hundred thousand. Too few, Liara thought, were seeing the benefits. Away from the cities people still lived as they had the day after the fighting stopped, in dire need, in makeshift homes. Too few were doing anything about it.

  
Control spoke again. “Hotel Uniform one seven seven, you are cleared proceed to orbit. Your escape velocity vector is Alpha eight one four. Good night.”

  
“Alpha eight one four, roger,” Alera said. She examined her screens, then said, “Seventeen hours, Doctor. Shall I call to have your apartment made ready?”

  
“No, Alera,” Liara said. “Let’s keep this as quiet as we can.”

  
“Aye,” Alera said. “I’ll reset the transponder once we jump to FTL.”

  
Liara nodded, and stood. The ship was climbing past the low orbital stations. Up above, the moon, a waning crescent out ahead of them, was rising. On the surface, there were several visible structures, some ruins, others newly built to replace what had been lost during the invasion.

  
“I’ll be in my cabin,” Liara said. “Let me know if you notice anything unusual.”

  
“As always.”

  
#

  
The ship was narrow and small, a new quarian design that Liara had modified extensively, with bigger drives, and a large array of communication gear, much of which she’d acquired illegally through intermediaries with access to supply chains, mostly in the Turian Heirarchy and the Alliance. It wasn’t as stealthy as the Normandy, but it was faster, and had better heat and drive-core endurance. The cost was comfort, meaning a slender passageway that linked the cockpit to the other compartments. Everything on the ship was miniscule, built to save space.

  
In the comms room, she found the other two crewmembers, a human named Karen Drummond, and another asari, Letha D’Anoris, were monitoring communications as nearby as local radio chatter to comm buoys as far away as Omega.

  
“Nothing, boss,” Karen said.

  
“And were sure no one’s following?” Liara said.

  
“We’ll know more once we cross the lunar threshold,” Letha said. “I’ll page you if we find anything. In the meantime try to sleep.”

  
Liara smiled and pressed on. Beyond this cramped room, the corridor split, upwards to her cabin, and downward to a small washroom, crew quarters, and a library, where Liara kept a collection of rare paper books, written in both asari dialects and in several human languages. She made her way up to her cabin. A screen mounted to the wall showed a series of views outside the ship. One displayed the earth dropping away behind them as the ship accelerated. It would eventually disappear as they crossed the light barrier. The other screens showed nothing but stars.

  
In the corner of the room was a wall that, when pressed in a certain way, would slide back to reveal a narrow alcove that contained a cache of weapons, a considerable amount of cash in various currencies, and a pedestal that held a quantum entanglement communicator. Technically she wasn’t permitted such a device, though she doubted the councilor would allow her to be handed a long prison sentence for possessing one. In any case, the communications were impossible to track, so as long as she and her associates were careful no one need know about it. She pressed a button and after a moment or two a salarian figure appeared through the static and turned to face her.

  
“You have work for me?”

  
“On the Presidium. There will be a set of remains delivered at Dock 81 A in about seven hours. Please claim them in the name of the Elara Grace Mortuary and Memorial. You’ll be supplied with an appropriate vehicle and uniforms for your team.”

  
“Who will be taking delivery?”

  
“The mortuary, of course,” Liara said.

  
“Of course.” The salarian stepped back, fading deeper into the static that flooded the edges of the image. “Further instructions?”

  
“Make sure the package stays shut. That’s all.”


	5. Away Team

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Essa and a small team of commandos and science personnel investigate the object in the Nixia's launch.

The four commandos were lined up outside the airlock, in their bulky, armored exosuits, and carrying carbine rifles. The youngest one had on breacher gear, carrying the infamous plasma torch. Of all of them, she seemed the most relaxed. The commandant and the captain were holding onto rungs at the mouth to the airlock, having some sort of wordless conversation. 

The science team, dressed much the same, their gear in cases, sidearms clipped to their chests above their regulator controls. T’Lanois was helping Essa put on her breather helmet before boarding the launch. She was saying, “Just hold still,” as Razia cleared her throat. 

The captain spoke first, though she seemed disgusted by what she was about to say. “This is primarily a military operation,” she said finally. A hairline scar that only showed itself during moments of intense mental stress appeared on her chin like a misaligned dimple. “That said,” she went on, “first contact protocol is in effect. For the past two hours we have been hailing our unknown contact on every frequency. We have received no response. On approach you will attempt to make further contact. The objective is to investigate first. Effecting entry during this operation is a secondary concern.”

Razia, behind the faceplate of her helmet looked on, bemused, as though these orders meant nothing. She shifted to face all assembled, “You know what that means. Weapons tight. Regulate. Science team, unless I give the order, if I see any of you with your sidearms drawn, I’ll shoot you myself. Clear?”

They were. There was a collective battle cry from the commandos that made the captain jump. 

Razia said, “Any questions?”

None.

Essa pulled herself through the throat of the airlock and into the cramped cockpit of the launch. T’Lanois followed her and took the right slot, buckling herself in to the rig that left its occupant in a standing position. Behind them, the commandos and the rest of the science team clipped themselves into their own slots. They were one space short: Razia would have to hook herself to the cargo webbing that covered the back of the crew cabin. Essa was not surprised to see that she appeared more than comfortable with this arrangement.

Thump thump on the hatch: good seal. Then, over the radio, from the captain, “Airlock cleared and sealed. Separation clearance granted.” 

The launch separated with a jolt, and Essa fired thrusters to maneuver them away from the Nixia. Out ahead, Parnitha glowed just above and to the right of the object, a cold and distant little spot of light. She fired the thrusters, two brief accelerations and then began their approach in earnest. T’Lanois monitored the instruments. “Hailing,” she said. After a pause, she said, “No response.”

The object grew larger. Essa kept steady on the controls, stopped the acceleration and let the launch drift. In the gravitational pull of the object, the launch began to yaw and Essa corrected. 

“Hailing again,” T’Lanois said. She hovered, bent low over a console covered in buttons and knobs. “Still nothing.” After a moment she looked up and said, “Hm!” She studied her panel again, as though to confirm something, then, calmly as she could, “We’ve been pinged.”

Essa relayed the information to the Nixia. “Roger that,” was the only response. Then, from the captain, “It must be a directional signal. We aren’t reading it.” 

After a moment T’Lanois said, “There it is again. Whatever that thing is, it knows we’re here.”

“Problems, Lieutenant?” Razia said.

“No,” Essa said, though she wondered if that were the truth. “We’re going to do one close pass, starside face first, to the far end of the structure.”

She rotated the ship to decelerate. In another few minutes they were level with the object, five hundred meters away from it. It was impossible to take in the entire object from this distance. They were at the end closest to the large central opening of the structure, inside of which were two rings that appeared to be moving. 

“Searchlights coming online,” T’Lanois said. 

Essa rotated the launch to better aim the light. A bright circle appeared on the side of the object: its surface wasn’t perfectly smooth, as she had thought it might be, but was covered in a layer of dust, that seemed to have accumulated in drifts and dunes. The thing looked like one of the antelopes that roamed the plains to the south of Armali, with its stripes and spots. Underneath the veneer of dust were indentations and what appeared to be viewports. 

“We’re being pinged again.”

“Any other energy sources?”

“Negative. None that I can read here.” 

Razia pointed at something on the display and said, “What is that?”

Essa stopped the launch’s drift and maneuvered the light to the spot Razia indicated. There, cast into strong relief by the light, was the unmistakable shape of a docking ring. 

“Another ping,” T’Lanois said. “They’re getting closer together.” She twisted a knob on her panel and said, “Ha. There—listen.” Silence at first, then, a soft pip. Essa counted to ten before she heard another. 

“We’re being pulled closer,” she said. “I’ll need to maneuver to finish our pass.”

Razia’s hand appeared on her shoulder again. “No. Bring us in closer.”  
Essa took her hands off the controls. “Our orders—”

“Your orders come from me,” Razia said. “Now, maneuver us in. We’ll finish our inspection later.”

Essa hesitated, but there again was the commandant’s hand on her shoulder. “Do it, lieutenant.”

She fired the thrusters and kicked the launch nearer and nearer the dock. The pips began coming closer together. Fifty meters out, Essa braked and the launch slowed to a crawl. Within the mouth of the airlock, she thought she’d seen something move. “Did you see that?” she said. 

Razia nodded. She touched a button on her shoulder and said, “Red team, weapons ready. Two minutes.”

“What are you doing?” T’Lanois said. 

“If it looks like a trap about to be sprung, I guarantee you it is.” She pulled her own carbine from its rack on the front of her suit and checked the safeties. “Get us in close, lieutenant. Don’t couple, and maintain radio contact.”

Essa stopped the launch just beyond the docking ring and signaled to Razia that she was ready to open the hatch. “Standby for decompression.”

The air blew out into space, and everything grew quiet, except for the sound of T’Lanois and the other crew breathing over the short-range comms. The force of the escaping atmosphere made the little ship drift, and Essa corrected. Minsicule ice crystals formed in the vacuum within the cabin and glued themselves to Essa’s visor. She reached up with a square of special cloth, trying to wipe them clear. The commandos pushed through the hatch, and she and T’Lanois watched them crossing the gap between the launch and the airlock. 

The breacher entered first, then two more followed. Then Razia, then the last commando. They moved swiftly, with absolute calm and assurance, as though they did this sort of thing every day. They were scarcely all inside the airlock, when the hatch shut behind them. Immediately their radios went dead. 

“Captain,” Essa said. “Are you seeing this?”

“Affirmative,” the captain said. “Try to raise them.”

“I guess she wasn’t joking about an ambush,” T’Lanois said. She unbuckled herself from her rig and went aft toward the hatch. Essa looked behind her, where the rest of the science team was gathered around, looking out into the circle of light that illuminated the docking ring. 

“Can anyone see anything?” Essa said. 

“Negative,” T’Lanois said. “There’s no window in the outer hatch. No obvious controls, no writing either.”

“Nixia please advise.”

“Standby,” came the answer. Essa recognized the Second Mate’s voice. “We’ve just picked up the probe’s signal.”

“Predictable,” T’Lanois said. “And now the Desinna and her crew will get all the glory.”

Essa laughed, despite herself. “I hope you’re joking.” 

T’Lanois growled over the comm, then shouted, “Lieutenant!” cried T’Lanois. “The outer hatch just opened. Airlock is clear. No window on the interior hatch. I think I see a control panel. I might be able to get to it.”

“Standby, doctor. We’re drifting.”

It had begun so subtly that she hadn’t caught it, but now the launch was perceptibly being pulled in toward the object. Essa fired the thrusters again, pulling about twenty meters from the object, and almost immediately there was another, stronger pull that caused the launch to land hard against the faring of the docking ring. A shock passed through the hull and behind her the unsecured crew screamed over the comms. 

Essa fired the thrusters again, but the launch didn’t move. The impuse was followed by a terrible wrenching sound. 

T’Lanois shouted, “Stop! We’ve been grappled! You’ll tear the hull!” 

Essa slowly unhooked from her rig and went after T’Lanois. One of the science team—Talira was her name—thought she had struck her head against the interior her helmet. Another was attending to her, though there was little anyone could do. A few droplets of purple blood had stuck to the interior of her faceplate. More came to join them, coalescing into larger beads. Essa watched Talira staring, panicked, at where they were gathering. 

Equipment containers had been shaken loose and floated around the cabin. Through the rear viewport, Essa saw isolated fragments of their heat shield slowly drifting away from the launch. 

“How badly is she hurt?” Essa said. 

T’Lanois shrugged. “There’s a pin-hole in the back of her helmet. She might have split open her scalp. Or one of our sidearms may have fired. She was getting out of her rig when we hit. And Arana seems to have broken her arm.” 

“We’re not leaking fuel,” Essa said. “At least there’s that.”

After the collision, the launch now sat steady on the docking mount. Essa saw that the connector had extended out a meter or two to make contact with their hatch, though it wasn’t apparent what was holding them fast. 

Arana groaned in the back of the cabin, and Talira’s helmet was visibly venting air. 

“We need to deal with that,” T’Lanois said. Essa blinked. The situation demanded action, but to radio the Nixia, to report a collision like this could only mean one thing for her: the end of her career as a deck officer. 

“Essa,” T’Lanois said, more forcefully. It took her somewhat by surprise, because on duty they called each other by their rank. “Essa. We need to do something.”

She blinked. Later she would remember the crackling of the radio, of sound ot Talira’s labored breathing, of the need to do something, and do it quickly. But at the moment, what she saw was that Neela had a fine pattern of tiny white spots that began beneath her eyes, and curved upward, making a masklike shape that extended across her brows and up the center of her forehead. Essa had never noticed the markings before, perhaps because she and Neela most often saw each other in the dim interior of the ship, but now in the reflected glow of the searchlight, there they were, like silver stones on a streambed. Such markings—referred to as Athame’s Diadem—were an uncommon, though natural occurrence. Some famous asari, especially the stars of stage and screen, liked to have their faces made up in that pattern, sometimes using dots of gold, or semiprecious stones. According to legend they appeared on individuals endowed with supernatural powers. 

While she stared, Essa saw Neela’s mouth working. She was shouting something then she grabbed her and forced her to turn. Droplets of blood now covered almost half of Talira’s faceplate. Over the comms, her breathing already sounded shallow and ragged. 

Essa bit down and returned to the cockpit. “Pan, pan, pan. Nixia, we are declaring an emergency condition.”

After a pause the captain said, “State your emergency.”

“The launch collided with the docking ring. There’s minimal damage, but we have two injured aboard.”

“Have you been able to raise the commando team?”

“Negative,” Essa thought a moment. Neela had seen what looked like a control panel. And there was an airlock. Such things only mattered when one was trying to maintain a breathable atmosphere. She keyed her radio again and said, “I am requesting permission to board the object.” 

“Say again, lieutenant.”

“I am requesting permission to carry our injured aboard,” Essa said, again, feeling now like a child who had overstepped her mother’s rules. 

“Negative, lieutenant. You are not to interfere with the commando operation.”

Neela said something behind her, but a burst of static nearly drowned her out. 

“Captain, we—”

The captain cut her off. “I’ve issued an order, lieutenant. You’d do well to follow it.”

Essa keyed her radio again. “Standby, Nixia.” She turned to face the cabin again. Talira’s breathing had a strange rasp to it, and periodically she gagged. Arana moaned again. 

Essa said, “I’m going to see what’s holding us fast.” Neela nodded, and moved over to the hatch to help her through. Talira gagged again and cried out, her voice painfully loud over the comms. Essa moved into the docking tube, folding metal walls that could extend and retract. Someone, or perhaps an automated system within had extended it to meet the launch’s hatch. There were no signs of grapples or other mechanical couplings, at least none she could easily release. Moving up the tube, she spotted the panel that Neela had suggested might control the airlock. It was just on the other side of the outer airlock door, and she couldn’t quite reach it without crossing into the interior. She pulled herself closer, careful not to fully cross the threshold of the airlock, and took several still images of the panel with a camera mounted in her helmet.

She sent them to Neela, then continued on again. “Do you think you can make any sense of the controls?” she said. Of course, the captain could see what she was looking at, as well. 

“If the commandos could, I’m guessing I’ll have the door open in short order.”

“Right,” Essa said. “Get up here. I’m coming down.”

Neela disappeared through the hatch. Essa gathered the rest of the team, instructing the two uninjured members to be prepared to move. There was a delay. Over the radio the captain called for an update. “Situation unchanged,” Essa said. And as she did, Neela stuck her head through the hatch and gestured for them to follow. 

Turning to the crew, Essa said, “Talira goes first. We’ll come back for our equipment if we can. Now move. Go.”

The two uninjured crew took Talira by her arms and legs and propelled her through the hatch. Arana went next, and Essa followed. Over the radio, she heard the captain shouting to stop at once. Essa ignored her, and she and the other five piled into the airlock and Neela touched one of the holographic buttons on the console and the outer door slid closed. There was no illumination inside the airlock, and for a moment the space felt a terrible jumble of legs and arms in the seconds it took for the inner door to arm and open. Talira flailed and the crewmember who was holding her slipped through the inner door and disappeared. Essa shouted for everyone to move, and the rest of the crew piled through the inner door. 

Bodies, limbs, the sensation of falling, shouts of surprise, the sound of their gear clattering together and then a sharp jolt on the back of her head. 

A moment later: Light. She saw that first. Streaming from floodlights mounted on pylons high above them. Then Essa felt something odd: weight. The weight of her own body, and with that came the oddly reassuring sensation of her own physical realness, when she returned to Thessia after a long time aboard ship. 

She pushed herself up onto her hands and knees. There was the sound of her hands and knees scuffing against the floor. There was an atmosphere. She wondered if it was breathable. Gravity. Air. Looking up again, she saw the decks of the object were horizontal, like in a building or on a surface ship. A space station that made its own gravity without rotation.

Asari scientists had been working on this problem for better than a century, with very poor results thus far. The most modern version required a user to wear a set of sensors, and a belt filled with almost a kilogram of a mineral salt common to Thessia, which, when exposed to an electric current could take on an exponential amount of mass, or shed it almost entirely. The properties of the mineral were well known, and had been for generations, though the implications of being able to gain or shed mass were only now becoming important, in space flight, in power generation, in the weapons they now carried strapped to their suits. The gravitic simulator worked on a similar principle, by creating small gravitational field between the user and the floor. Or at least it did about half the time. The rest, well—sometimes the user ended up with broken bones. 

Essa got to her feet. A step to her right confirmed that something was pulling at her, but how it functioned was beyond her. 

Looking over at Talira, she saw that the blood that had gathered on the faceplate of her helmet had run downward, collecting in the padding by her neck. Thick streams of blood and mucus ran from her nostrils. She must have inhaled some of the droplets while still aboard the launch. There was a long gash in her cheek. 

“What do you think?” Neela said. 

“Any way to analyze the atmosphere?”

“Aside from taking off your helmet?” Neela said. “No.”

Essa nodded. She grabbed her helmet and gave it a twist, unlocking the seals around her neck, and pulling it free. She breathed in. The air was cold, and when she breathed out, a long trail of vapor exited her mouth. Neela watched her carefully. 

“You’re not changing color. You’re not gasping. That’s good.”

“It’s cold, and a bit thin, like mountain air. No dodgy smells.”

The other crewmembers were already disengaging their helmets, too. After a moment, Neela gave up and followed suit. She knelt down by Talira. A bullet, one of the new projectiles that was barely larger than a grain of sand, had pierced her helmet, and a fragment of it had penetrated her neck, leaving a ragged, ugly exit wound above her lower jaw. Somehow it seemed to have missed all the major blood vessels and her spine. Neela pulled out her first aid pouch and began packing the wounds with clotting wool. “You mustn’t try to talk,” she said, closing the wounds with flesh glue and spray bandages. As she worked Talira struggled, thrashed her arms and eventually passed out. Neela looked at the pool of blood on the floor, then up at Essa. “I think she’s going to be all right. She’ll have a bad scar though.”

“We need to find the commandos.” Essa said. She tried the radio, using their familiar call sign, but received no response. She wanted to say, We need to get out of here. She looked around the area. They were in a broad tunnel that looked like it had been designed as a thoroughfare for rolling freight. Down the way, perhaps as far as a kilometer distant, were several indentations in the interior bulkhead that appeared to lead to other parts of the installation.

Neela was sorting through the remaining first aid pouches. She set Talira’s wrist tool to display her vital signs. Handing over a syringe to the other two scientists, she said, “If any of these numbers begin to crash, inject her with this, right there.” She indicated the spot with her index finger, “and radio immediately.”

Essa told them, “It would be best to send two teams in opposite directions, but someone needs to stay with the injured, and I’m not going to ask you to go out alone. Stay here. Radio if the commandos return.”

“Aye, lieutenant.”

Essa and Neela checked their own sidearms and began moving foreward across the deck. “We’ll take the next opening we find.” Neela gave a nod, then stooped to examine something on the floor. 

“Hold on, look at this,” Neela said. “What do you make of these markings?”

She panned her light across the ground so Essa could see. When the light struck certain sections of the floor, a set of arrows appeared. 

“The commandos are marking their route,” Essa said after a moment. 

“So we follow them?”

Essa nodded. It was the only thing to do. 

“Do you have any idea where we’re going?” Neela asked. 

Essa didn’t, but said only, “Someone, or something had to know we were here,” she said. “It pinged us, it turned on the lights for us. It stands to reason that there’s got to be a control panel with a switch that will unhook us from the docking tube.”

Neela made a sound in agreement. In this light the Diadem markings on her face were particularly prominent. 

They went down the corridor, carefully, for what felt like a long time. Occasionally they found old—alien—markings stenciled on the bulkheads and floors, but nothing they could make sense of. Neela photographed them. “You never know,” she said. 

The other crewmembers radioed a few minutes later to say that Talira seemed to be stabilizing, though they’d had to redress her wounds. She was resting now, but no longer unconscious. 

“Reassuring, I suppose,” Neela said. Essa shrugged. She pointed to one of the commando’s markings on the floor that in turn directed them to a large opening that led toward the interior. Neela followed her through. They were in a broad tunnel, poorly lit. They couldn’t see the other end. 

“Nothing could possibly go wrong in here,” Neela said. Essa pressed on and pointed to another one of the commando’s markings. They seemed to be spaced about fifty meters apart. They walked that far, and not finding another marking doubled back to see if there was a passageway they had somehow missed. There wasn’t, so they continued on their way 

“I think I’ve seen this movie,” Neela said. “It all starts to go wrong when someone says, ‘Don’t go in there.’”

“Maybe they stopped marking when they realized there was no way to get lost in here.”

“I’m sure that’s it,” Neela said. “An advanced race of unknown beings. All of them gone. A team of highly trained asari commandos, armed, biotic, they all just abandon their own protocol and then vanish, too. Yeah, sure.” 

“You think this whole was built for us to supply food?”

Neela shrugged.

“I think you’re overestimating our nutritional value.”

“I’m only saying—why are we sticking to the floor? How is that happening? Why aren’t we bouncing off the walls like on the Nixia?”

Essa put up her hands. She had no answers.

“Nothing about this seems right.”

The end of the tunnel had come into view. Out ahead of them, what appeared to be cables lay sprawled over the ground. Walking ahead, Essa thought she saw something moving and her hand tightened around the grip of her pistol. 

Neela had drawn her weapon, too. “This is the part,” she said, “Where I say ‘Don’t go in there,’ and you go anyway. And then I get eaten.” 

“Something’s moving up ahead.” 

Neela rolled and threw herself against the far wall, where there was a little cover, and peered out. “What do you see?”

Essa walked forward a few more steps. At first she thought it was light falling through a grating, but it continued to move. The pattern was irregular, but not like something poking its head out to get a better look at her. It might have been alive, but she felt a warm breeze blowing. 

Essa lowered her weapon and clipped back in place. By then she had reached the end of the tunnel. She stepped forward and gestured again for Neela to follow. 

“It’s all right,” Essa said. “It’s just leaves moving in the wind.”

“What?” Neela did not put away her weapon, but held it, muzzle pointed at the floor, as she approached the spot where Essa was standing.

The two of them exited the hallway and stepped out into a garden that stretched out in both directions, not in front of them and behind, but up and away, underneath a narrow transparent dome that followed the same curve. Thin clouds of fog passed overhead, at treetop level. Above them, in front of them, wheeled the two massive rings they had seen earlier, turning slowly in the dark of space. And in the middle of the rings, perhaps held there by their motion, was a bright blue light that bathed them and the trees in its warmth, as bright as a miniature star.


	6. Anatomy

There was no indication that they’d been followed out of Sol. Possibly no one cared where she was going. More likely, they already knew her destination. Liara tried to relax as they passed through the secondary relay in the Annos Basin. It was an odd way to get to the Citadel, but necessary since the end of the war. The faster primary that connected the Exodus Cluster to Widow had been damaged. Subsequent repairs had left it unreliable. After several ships had failed to turn up at the Widow relay, the authorities had closed the linkage indefinitely. Liara didn’t mind the extra hours added on to her journey. It gave her time to prepare, time to wonder about what Arclight had sent her, and time to lay on her bed and examine the ceiling, to dream of sleeping, if sleep itself wouldn’t come.

 

At seven the next morning, she was bathed and dressed, and riding in a car piloted by Alera toward one of the taller structures on Tayseri Ward, home to Elara Grace Mortuary and Memorial, a small, privately owned funeral home that serviced the large asari and salarian communities, who were losing their offspring in droves in the Traverse, largely thanks to the lure of mercenary work. Nothing, it seemed, ever changed.

 

 Alera maneuvered toward the skyscraper, lighting on a platform at the top of the structure, where several private garages were ranged against the building’s spinward face. When the bay doors had shut behind them, Alera raised the canopy and they stepped out. Liara immediately went downstairs to the reception level, where a young salarian named Eldrin was waiting for her with a datapad in a leather cover in his three-fingered hand.

 

“Doctor,” he said. “Everything has gone smoothly with your arrival, I trust?”

 

“It has,” Liara said. “How are the arrangements proceeding for Matriarch Tilaria’s niece?”

 

“A tragic occurrence,” Eldrin said, his voice serene and quiet. “So many of your young, throwing their lives away in the colonies.”

 

Liara was quiet. A few simple lines of code, but couched in too much truth. After the invasion, things had turned quickly again to conflict. Money chasing money. Corporation fighting corporation. Especially in the Traverse and Terminus systems, where the Council had no influence at all any more. Old mercenary bands, Eclipse, Blue Suns, Blood Pack, Talon Company, all but wiped out in the invasion had largely been replaced by new operations that provided the same services and charged the same rates. New names, same old story. The young chasing fortune and glory, their elders counting profits and writing off the dead as a business expense.

 

Mercenary work thrived on desperation, and there was plenty of that to go around. The asari born after the invasion had grown up restless and poor, never a good combination. And, Liara thought, just because an asari could live more than a thousand years, it didn’t mean that she _would_. How many, she wondered survived that long? Perhaps one in a hundred. One in a thousand. Not many.

 

 

Not that anyone on the Citadel would pretend to notice the losses. And here, in the mortuary, the footpaths marking the polished stone floors, the tasteful flowers and abstract sculpture, the running water, each a sign of time slipping away from us all, covered over that sad truth with a veneer of false serenity. Liara almost hated herself for purchasing the business, one of the many fronts she’d established before laying bare her networks.  

 

It did have one advantage, though. Three floors down, on a windowless level, behind a series of security doors, was a lab, where Liara now found the package Arclight had sent her. Eldrin led her into the lab, and dropping the quiet, calm demeanor of a mortuary attendant, he directed her to where a human wearing a surgeon’s uniform stood beside a tray of surgical tools. Behind him was what Arclight had sent: an oblong box, sturdy and heavy, with a series of controls to manage its internal refrigeration system. The lid was shut, with security tape over the closures.

 

“No one has touched it?” Liara said.

 

“It’s been under my observation since it arrived,” the human said. He was small for a male, both skinny and short. Doctor Alex Mason was a surgeon at Huerta Memorial, but Liara had hired him for special work, almost twenty years ago, and he had proven to be reliable, and very, very discreet.  

 

“And our friend?” she said, meaning Arclight.

 

Eldrin shook his head. “I’m afraid the only survivor from his team was the messenger he sent along with this—” and gestured at the box.

 

“Where were they?”

 

“Pirin,” Eldrin said. “A new human colony.”

 

“I’ve heard of it,” Liara cut in. “From what I understand, it’s mostly water. And none too warm.”

 

“There are dozens of islands,” Eldrin said. “Some of them are quite large.”

 

Liara knelt down and put a hand to the box. It was quite cold. “Do we know what he was doing there?”

 

“He and his team had been hired to do security for a group of visiting diplomats. They’d gone to mediate a dispute over land ownership in one of the larger archipelagos. There’s been a good deal of unrest there, between ownership and labor.”

 

“It would seem so,” Liara said. She looked at Mason. “Any idea what we have?”

 

“Only one way to find out,” Mason said. “Let’s get started.”

 

“This is all very exciting,” Eldrin said. His hands were balled into fists. “A new specimen for study. We haven’t had one this interesting in a while, from I understand. Reaper tech, isn’t it?”

 

“No one said that, kid,” said Mason.

 

“Be careful what you wish for, Eldrin,” said Liara.

 

“And put on your gear. Who knows what you might catch from this thing.”

 

“Right, right.” Eldrin said. He and Mason went into an alcove behind the slab table, where they donned pressurized suits, breather helmets and heavy boots. Returning to the lab, they connected their suits to hoses that would provide them fresh air while they worked.

 

“Doctor T’Soni,” Mason said. “It’s probably best if you observe from outside.”

 

Liara nodded. She returned to the door and stepped out. Nearby was a darkened room the size of a large closet, where half a dozen monitors showed the operating theater from every possible angle. The lab itself was built inside a capsule that hung on cables. If anything should go wrong—not that she expected it to—it could be flushed with plasma, killing everything within. And in case that didn’t do the trick, the cables could be cut, and the entire lab ejected into space.

 

Sitting down, Liara locked them in—they would be there for the duration—and spoke into a microphone, saying, “I’m ready. Let’s begin.”

 

The first part was always the same. Mason cut open the seals and raised the lid.

 

“Looks like your friend did this properly,” he said as he and Eldrin lifted the body bag out of the casket. “Kept it cold, pumped the case full of argon to stop decomposition. Good. Good.”

 

They noted the information marked on the bag, date, species, and location of collection of the sample. They weighed it, then sliced open the bag top to bottom. Inside was an asari, her age uncertain, at least until they could dissect her brain. She wasn’t too tall, and had a pale vertical line marking her chin. The front of her uniform was torn open, and soaked in purple blood. There were multiple gunshot wounds to her body, three in the chest, and one more in the head. Part of the cranium was blown away. She was still wearing a uniform that identified her as a resident of the predominantly human colony, Pirin. Before her death, she’d been a mechanic who worked in the agricultural sector of Arras the settlement where the unrest had begun.

 

“Looks like we have something here under the uniform,” Mason said. He peeled back the outer layer, showing the wounds, and the implanted material. He and Eldrin cut off the rest of the uniform and began their dissection. Liara watched in the cameras as Mason detailed the wounds. “This one here isn’t fatal. Messy thought. Small entry wound over the right hip, hit the bone and exploded out through her lower back. Medical attention would have saved her, but probably it hurt enough to immobilize her. Firefight ends, and along comes your friend. Double-tap to the chest puts her down for good.” He paused. “Not a very humane thing to do, executing the wounded.”

 

“Arclight was efficient,” Liara said, “but he was not what I would consider merciful.” She studied the screens and thought for a moment. Then she, “The shot to the head, then, was it post-mortem?”

 

“Looks like it,” Mason said. “And it appears to have happened much later.” Eldrin lifted the asari’s head so Liara could see. “See how the blood’s coagulated inside the skull? I’m guessing she’d been dead for several hours.”

 

“Making sure?” Eldrin said.

 

“Of what, though?” Liara said. “His message to me contained evidence of at least three more bodies given similar treatment.”

 

Two hundred years ago she’d have known. Now reapers were old news, and she hoped they were going to stay that way. On the Citadel, the main concerns remained economic growth at all costs. Hence their secondary concern of stemming the new Krogan expansion near the borders of salarian and asari space, the inscrutable geth, the lurking rachni. Many promises had been made during the war; the council had held up most of their bargains, but not all. Dozens of other threats remained just beneath the surface, keeping the Spectres busy. If anyone mentioned reapers, it was largely a matter of old history, or at the very most, debris fields like the one around earth that periodically troubled local starship traffic.

 

The autopsy went on for several more hours. They removed her brain, weighed it, then dissected several key pieces to determine her age, which Mason put at roughly six hundred years. “She might have been older, but with the damage the bullet did, that’s as close as I can estimate.”

 

Next they opened the thorax and removed the implanted devices growing through her body. The device was considerably larger than Liara would have thought, having displaced, even crushed, several of her major organs.

 

“It doesn’t seem like she would have gone on living much longer like this,” Mason said. “She had an internal bleed right here. There’s a big clot forming. Would have killed her eventually, maybe in as little as a few days.”

 

“Not as quickly as the bullets,” Eldrin said.

 

They had to roll her over to remove the implanted device. Part of it consisted of a wire-like structure that entered her spine and traveled up the column into her brain. Eldrin took the device away to a separate part of the lab and began running tests on it. Mason looked up into the cameras at Liara. He looked troubled: his aging face was pale behind the faceplate of his helmet, and covered in sweat.

 

“I don’t like this at all, Doctor,” he said.

 

“Nor do I.” Liara stood up and paced the observation room. “This has all the stink of indoctrination on it. But it’s not the same.”

 

“If you say so. Some of the structures look pretty similar to the husks you described from the war.”

 

Liara agreed, but was interrupted by Eldrin shouting, “Doctors!” He was calling to them from his station at the other end of the lab. Liara changed cameras so she could see. “Have a look at this.”

 

He switched to a microscopic view of the implanted material. Liara gasped at what she was seeing: cell walls, organelles, layers of tissue. Within the tissue, something that looked like mites were moving, burrowing, forming new structures. Living creatures, tearing up original structures and forming new ones.

 

“This isn’t an implant,” Eldrin said.

 

“No,” Liara said. She zoomed in to get a better look. “It’s an infection.”

 

Eldrin had isolated some of the mites.

 

“They’re no larger than a cell themselves,” Liara said. “How can they function at such a small scale?”

 

Eldrin was studying a readout at his work station. “They appear to have analogues of gross musculature, and insectoid mouth parts. It doesn’t appear that they’re feeding, thus individuals won’t live very long. It seems they’re breeding out of her cells. Not all of them have ceased functioning yet, thanks to refrigeration. They’re actually using her own genetic material to reproduce. These mites appear to be specific to her.”

 

“Well, I suppose that is good news,” Liara said.  

 

“I didn’t say they couldn’t adapt,” Eldrin said, a bit too sharply. He turned again to his screens.

 

“So it’s a parasite,” Liara said. “What are they doing to her?”

 

Eldrin didn’t answer.

 

“Making more,” Mason said. “I gather.”

 

“No,” Eldrin cut in. “Not just that,” he said. “The dendrite into her brain says otherwise. It was exacting some kind of control over her.”

 

“Eldrin,” Liara said, “Compare it to samples from the Thorian. I made sure to obtain Exogeni’s data over the years.”

 

“Yes, yes, yes,” Eldrin said, though it wasn’t clear why. “Not that. I suppose they work by similar means, but it’s not the same organism. We would need to—test—these on living tissue to see what they’re really for.”

 

“Doesn’t make any sense, though,” Mason said after he’d let Eldrin work a while longer. “The thing was killing her. It had caused a bleed around her pericardial sac. No one lives through that for long. Most parasites want to keep their host alive, at least for a while.”

 

“Unless,” Eldrin said, “this infestation was merely a transitional stage between a reservoir of dormant pathogens and its actual host.”

 

“So she was a breeding ground then,” Liara said.

 

“If you look at these sacs here,” Eldrin said, highlighting several areas on his screen, “You can see that other things are growing. Perhaps just like the mites, only somewhat larger. I think we can only guess as to the purpose of the dendrite in the brain.”

 

“Where was she from?” Mason said. Liara glanced at the map of the colony where she’d been found. Arclight had marked the positions he and his team were defending at the time, a choke point that controlled access to the port and harbor complex that traded with about a dozen of the other, larger islands. They’d been overrun two days ago. Likely those infected had boarded ships to other parts of the archipelago. The nearest space port, Liara saw, was thankfully about a week’s journey by boat. Apparently Arclight, when he’d learned what was happening, had gone ahead and destroyed most of the flying vehicles on the island. Apparently they’d been trying to do the same with the ships, but hadn’t quite finished when the battle had reached Arras.

 

Liara gasped and said, “It appears that she and her comrades were trying to get off the island. Perhaps to one of the larger cities.”

 

“That explains a good deal,” Eldrin said. “Infect more, increase your coverage. So the dendrite causes them to—migrate—I suppose you’d say. And yet she and her comrades were in an upland area to begin, weren’t they?”

 

Liara sighed, relieved, momentarily. It wouldn’t have been the first time a parasitic infestation would have caused this sort of unrest. She thought of the people of Zhu’s Hope on Feros. The Thorian may have been the only one of its kind on the planet—though perhaps even that was unlikely—and it certainly wasn’t the only one in the galaxy. Its spores could have been carried on ships from one end of the galaxy to the other. Likely these mites didn’t originate on Pirin. Or if they did, chances were, they’d turn up again.

 

Only two things were important: the first being that these parasites appeared to have something to do with all the political unrest, or at the very least they were causing the unrest to spill over into violence. And second, that it wasn’t reaper technology.

 

Into the microphone Liara said, “Eldrin, make certain you keep samples. I’ll inform the council of the infestation. These people need treatment, and perhaps relocation. The Alliance will want to make sure to quarantine the island so that the infestation doesn’t spread, and stop any ships that may have been boarded during the fighting.”

 

“Samples,” Eldrin said. “I’d like to preserve this organism—alive.”

 

“No,” Liara said. “Dead tissue only, in containment. All other materials must be destroyed.” Eldrin began to protest, but Liara cut him off, “We will share our data with the Council and the Alliance. There’s nothing more we can do.”

 

Eldrin began to speak again, but Liara stopped him. “There’s no reaper involvement,” she said. “As I had hoped. See to it that this woman receives the proper rituals. Her tag marks her as a practitioner of Siari. Their preferred method is cremation.”

 

“But, Doctor,” Eldrin said.

 

“That will be all, Eldrin,” Liara said, and rose from her chair. She’d been in that little room for far too long. She had Alera fly her to the Presidium, where the new asari councilor kept her waiting a good twenty minutes. Matriarch Deniri had been appointed only two years prior, and seemed to want to her importance to Liara.

 

“The humans will want to know about this,” Matriarch Deniri said.

 

“I have already forwarded our results on to the Alliance, through the appropriate channels.”

 

“And you assure me you’ve no involvement with the unrest?”

 

“Councilor, my reach was never that great,” Liara said, pretending to be offended. “Arclight was an old associate. A _former_ associate at that.”

 

“All the same,” Deniri said, “He came to you with his information.”

 

“He survived the invasion, as you and I did. And I’m happy to say his vigilance was much appreciated, both then, as it is now. Alas his mission failed, and I fear what that means.”

 

Deniri nodded. “And these individuals have no access to off world transport?”

 

“Not yet,” Liara said. “Though I recommend swift action to make certain things stay that way.”

 

Deniri nodded, and opened her omnitool. “I’ll convene the council. Officially this will be an Alliance matter, and we shall allow them to handle it as they see fit, though we will step in if we need to.” Liara nodded and had risen to leave.

 

Deniri stopped her with a word. “In the meantime,” she said. “I have further use for you here, on Zakera Ward.”

 

Liara stopped and turned to face Deniri. “Yes?”

 

“It appears that something of your mother’s has turned up, buried in the foundations of a structure that was recently torn down.”

 

“Buried, you say?”

 

“Yes,” Deniri said, turning away to face the windows of her office. “You were always good at digging, weren’t you?”


	7. Garden and Star

Wind, Essa thought. Altogether, she had spent more than a decade in space, much of it well beyond the orbitals around Thessia. Often months at a time, crammed into a too small ship with too large a crew. Tight quarters never bothered her, or the dehydrated food, or the uncomfortable and noisy sleeping arrangements. She had always been able to get along with almost anyone. She didn’t miss the pull of gravity or the comfort of solid ground beneath her feet. What she missed, the first thing she wanted to feel when returning planetside was weather: wind, rain, sunlight. And here it was, blowing ancient leaves along the dead ground. 

Twilight from the little star fell over them as they went deeper into the dead garden. The light made it feel warmer, but it was still cold. All the plants had been dead for a long time, and the leaves crumbled into dust when she touched them.

Neela, after a moment of stunned silence, had strayed off on her own. Already the lamps from her suit were shining between the trees, fifty meters away. Over the comm, she said, “Do you recognize these trees?” 

Essa wasn’t sure. 

“You should,” Neela said. “Splitleaf, trifolia, northern spike pine.”

Essa shined her lights upward, into the branches. She’d studied botany at university, but she didn’t see anything familiar now. She’d always preferred engineering. “I don’t know plant species.”

“You understand what I’m saying, don’t you? These are all from Thessia.” 

“I suppose it only makes sense,” Essa said. 

“No, you’re not understanding me,” Neela said. “The northern spike pine has been extinct for—I don’t know how long. Perhaps more than fifty thousand years. Sometime during the Third Migration, when the tribes expanding northward needed fuel to survive over winter. They were wiped out. The forests came back, but not the pine. We’ve only ever found specimens that sunk into deep, oxygen poor fresh water. Or in the fossil record. It’s been gone for millennia, at least. Probably much longer.”

Essa had almost reached Neela, but found herself obliged to crawl over a mound of interlaced roots nearly as tall as she was. Breathing hard, she tumbled down to where Neela stood, examining clumps of ferns, their leaves disintegrating at her touch. Neela began taking pictures. “We’ve got to preserve this,” she said. “They’re going to finally have to give me tenure at Serrice when they see these pictures. If we make it back, I should say.” After a pause she added, “Where do you think the commandos went?”

Essa made a sound at the back of her throat, not wanting to think about it. The bigger problem, as far as she was concerned, was that the ground curved up and away from them in the distance, eventually arching up overhead. The gravity seemed to be holding things to the floor, no matter which way the floor was pointing, but she was having trouble making sense of it all. The commandos could have gone anywhere, and unless they started answering her calls over the radio, in an installation this size, it seemed unlikely they would find them. Not before hunger and thirst, or exposure took them. 

Neela was moving again, and Essa followed her. 

“This was a footpath,” Neela said. She traced a groove cut into the ground by thousands of moving feet. 

“Meaning what? Animals?”

“No,” Neela said with a laugh, “I think this place was a garden.”

“Why not, I suppose.” 

They kept going. There was no sign of the commandos, but every so often, Neela muttered something about extinct species of trees. Before long, they reached a stream. Arching over it was a narrow bridge with no railings. Here Neela stopped and bent low over the bank of the stream. 

“Look at this,” she said. She was snapping pictures in the mud. “That’s a footprint.”

“Razia and her band?” Essa said. 

“Not unless they all have two toes.”

Essa let out an exclamation. “I suppose nothing should surprise us, after everything that’s happened.”

“See, something barefoot came across the stream here.” Neela pointed to a very faint outline. Pulling something from her belt, she sprayed foam into the print, whose outlines Essa could scarcely see. After a moment she pried it clear and held it up. “See? Only two toes. It’s been here for a long time. No wind or rain to rub it out.” She slipped the lump of foam into her bag of gear then continued on, plunging into the water that reached almost to her waist. At the edges of the current, slushy ice bobbed among the stones and stuck to the mud of the bank. Neela moved carefully, and called back for Essa to come after her. “Don’t fall down,” she advised. “If you do, your suit will fill up with icy water and you’ll drown in less than a minute. I won’t be able to help you.”

She found more prints on the opposite bank. “Same individual, I think.”

“And they’re not still here?”

Neela shook her head. “I don’t think we’ll find anything living. Might be nice to find a skeleton.”

“Then we need to keep looking for the commandos.”

They walked for a good distance, following the upward slope of the garden, and searching among the clusters of trees and brambles and rocky outcroppings for another exit. 

For some distance they found none, and so they walked up the long upward slope of the garden, until they had reached roughly the midway point between the two arms. The little blue star still hung suspended directly over their heads, and the place where they had entered receded into the distance, and the chilly fog that swirled through the treetops that bordered the stream hung in a layer below them. Out ahead, more of the same territory awaited. Clusters of trees, long overgrown, and dead. Clearings full of tall grasses and ferns, most of them familiar from Thessia, that sometimes disintegrated when touched. They were alone, but for each other, and for the dead trees, and the ghostly presence of a long dead alien race, suggested by the occasional footpath, or bridge, or broken stone bench stationed at the edge of an outlook. 

At length, Essa said, “Who do you think lived here?”

Neela didn’t answer, but only stopped to photograph a few more trees. 

“All the way out here at the edge of the system,” Essa said. “All the technology in the world, it seems. Here we are sticking to the floor. We were stuck to the floor all the way back down there. But the floor was pointing in a different direction back there. Why put something this big this far away from the only habitable planet. After all, it seems like whoever they were, they were more or less like us. They needed oxygen and light, and—whatever this is.”

Neela made a sound, but again didn’t answer. A fallen tree blocked their way, and the two spent a good five minutes getting around it. On the other side of the massive stump was something that looked like a park bench, made of polished stone. The bench was situated at an overlook, and Neela took a moment to sit down. “I’m tired,” she said. Essa took a seat beside her. They had, she saw now, been climbing the slope of relatively tall a hill. They were above the layer of fog. Stands of tall trees and other hilltops rose up through the haze that shimmered silver in the low light. Essa let out a gasp as a cold gust of wind blew a cloud over their vantage.

“It’s beautiful, don’t you think?”

Neela agreed. “I wonder, too. All this effort, for what? Anyone that could have built this—we’re lucky they meant us well. Or that we were so insignificant it seemed pointless to destroy us.”

Essa got up to turn out of the wind. “And they did come to Thessia. I wonder what they thought of us when the arrived.”

Neela shrugged. “Not enough to make an impression in the historical record, I suppose.” She looked up at Essa. The markings on her face seemed to glimmer in the light from the star. 

“I never noticed before,” Essa said, “that you had the Diadem.”

Neela seemed to blush. “Not many do. It’s very faint, except in certain light.” She got up and stretched. “We should keep going.” And after they’d walked for a while, she said, “I’m glad you saw. My birthmarks, I mean. Not many people see them for what they are.” She reached out and gave Essa’s hand an affectionate squeeze. 

After about an hour they found a rock outcrop that concealed an opening that lead back into the station. Within they found a similar corridor where they left muddy footprints, and where after having traveled some distance they discovered a passageway leading to a series of rooms that appeared to have been living quarters. They hadn’t seen a sign of the commandos since the long tunnel they’d entered earlier. 

“We’ll never find them,” Neela said. “Not like this.”

There was another room, a mess hall, perhaps, spotlessly clean and orderly, with tables and chairs made for creatures roughly the same size as an asari. Essa realized she was hungry, but decided to save the rations she kept stored in her utility belt for later. 

Up ahead they found a junction in the corridors where paths branched away in five directions. There was something that appeared as though it might have been a utility vehicle parked at the intersection, and Essa looked it over while Neela studied the markings designating the different pathways. 

“Will it run?” she said. 

Essa pushed a few buttons, but the machine, whatever it was meant to do, didn’t respond. “I don’t think so,” and then, touching one more switch, the vehicle lifted up off the ground and hovered at ankle height above the floor. 

Neela looked at Essa and shook her head. “I suppose nothing is every going to surprise me again.”

A few minutes more and Essa had figured out more or less how to make the thing go. It was hard to control, slipping and sliding in every direction like a wheeled vehicle on ice. She and Neela climbed aboard. Neela indicated a direction, and they moved off down the corridor, slowly at first, then at greater speed. In short order they reached a set of doors that did not open when they approached. Neela studied it for a moment and pressed her fingers to a square panel in the middle. The two halves of the opening slid apart and they walked into a dimly lit room. 

Glass screens partitioned off an inner area. The screens began to light up as they approached, and in the center of the room, a holographic projection appeared and slowly came into focus. Essa stood and stared. There at the center of the display was Parnitha, and surrounding that, the six planets, each in their position relative to it. Essa didn’t have to study the display for long to realize that it was a real-time image. At the outermost edge of the display was a smaller shape, not to scale, of the installation they’d entered a few hours ago. A small orange pip indicated the Nixia, which Essa now saw had moved a considerable distance away from the installation.

“They’ve gone to recover the probe,” she said. And as she said it, another small orange dot appeared at the outermost edge of the display. “That must be the probe itself.” 

“They’ll come back for us, won’t they?” Neela said. 

Essa affirmed that they would. She looked more closely, then, reached into the display, wanting to touch one of the objects it contained. Her fingers seemed to close around Thessia, and as they did, she felt something solid in her hand. She pulled it to her, and as she did the image of the planet got bigger and bigger, until it began to show the locations of some of the larger orbital stations surrounding her home planet. There were dots everywhere now, Essa saw, other ships moving around the system: the regular traffic between Thessia and High Rock was marked by a line of ships following the weeks long route that connected their homeworld to the installation. There was a supply ship returning from one of the orbital stations around Athame. Dozens up dozens swarmed low orbit around Thessia itself.

“This installation knows everything about is,” she said with a gasp. 

Neela was standing beside her. “I wonder how much high command knows about it,” she said. 

The screens that surrounded the central display came alive, and beneath their feet, Essa felt something begin to hum, a low rumble that traveled through the floor and resonated up through feet and legs. 

“I think we woke it up,” Neela said. 

“Do you see that?” Essa said. Another small dot—larger than the Nixia—had appeared near the edge of Tevura’s outermost ring and was heading in the general direction of where they now were. 

Neela squinted. She needed visual correction, Essa thought, but perhaps was reluctant to resort to surgery. Aboard ship, she sometimes saw her wearing spectacles to read. “What is it?” she asked. 

“Maybe it’s an asteroid that’s been ejected from orbit, or pulled off track.”

“We’re a bit far out for asteroids that large,” Neela said. “A comet, then? No, a comet would have probably broken up, so close in to the planet.”

They studied the display some more. Essa began experimenting with the interface a bit more and soon had figured out how to move from one vantage point to another. Focusing in on High Rock, she pointed at a dozen small dots. “The blips all represent spacecraft,” she said. “The planets are all considerably more detailed. There’s even a display of local weather patterns on Thessia. And here, you can even see the space elevators.”

They looked closely at more of the asteroids, many of which were fully detailed, their cratering and rugged shapes represented accurately when they zoomed in close. 

The dot, meanwhile, continued to separate from Tevura’s Psi ring, increasing its distance, apparently accelerating. The Nixia, meanwhile, continued on its path, drawing closer to the probe, and moving away from the installation. 

“I wonder if they’ve detected that,” Essa said, pointing at the dot again. 

“We should probably get back to the launch,” Neela said. For some reason she sounded frightened. 

Behind her the board lit up, displaying a picture of the installation. Lines of something—important data, but written in an undecipherable language appeared beside the image. Essa went over to it as several sections of the diagram lit up, showing either red or green. Thousands of characters, grouped into what Essa knew were either numbers or words, or more likely both, appeared in a box on the screen to her right, and a faint pipping sound accompanied them. 

Neela went over to that display and began comparing what she was reading to some of the images on her wrist tool. 

“We need to get out of here,” she said. “That thing seems to be headed directly for us.”

“How soon until it arrives?”

Neela studied the console again, and again looked at her wrist tool. “No way to be sure.” She pointed to a row of characters on the board that appeared to be constantly changing. “I think these are numbers, and they’re getting smaller. At the rate they’re going I’d say we have two hours, maybe less.” After a moment, she said, “Look at this though.” She touched something on the screen, and Essa heard not one but two sounds. A steady pip-pip-pip came from the console. Added to that a low growl that appeared to be coming from the object that was approaching them. “It sounds like they’re communicating,” Neela said. She tapped a button on her wrist tool and captured a portion of the signal for analysis. 

Essa thought about how long it had taken the Nixia to draw near to the object where she now found herself and the rate at which this new contact was approaching. “All right,” she said. “Let’s go.”

#

The door slid open, and Essa found herself staring into the barrel of a gun. Unseen hands grabbed her shoulder and threw her to the floor. Neela landed beside her. She struggled, but someone held her down and snatched away her sidearm before she could reach for it. 

“The devil were you thinking Lieutenant?” Commandant Razia. 

Essa got up onto her knees and looked. One of the commandos was standing close, looking like she was ready to send her back to the floor, either with a bullet or a hard kick to the side of her head. Razia came up beside her, carbine ready, but not aimed at anything. 

Essa didn’t speak. 

“Is there a reason you’re interfering with my operation?” Razia said.

Essa looked up. “After you boarded, the launch collided with the docking ring. Something pulled us in.”

“Doesn’t explain why you’re here.”

“Two of my crew were injured in the crash. One of them badly.” Essa said, “It looked like we would find a breathable atmosphere inside, so we followed you through the airlock.”

Razia looked furious, but said nothing. 

“We followed you as far as you’d marked,” Essa said. “But we lost your trail. Soon enough we found that—garden—and somehow it led us here.”

“We saw what happened after you came through the airlock. We knew that you were tracking us and decided to lay up and see what kind of game you were playing.”

Essa only counted four in the squad. There should have been one more. “Did you lose someone?” she said. 

“Our medic. I sent her back to tend to your wounded.” Turning to Neela, she said “You did a fine job with the projectile wound, or so the medic tells me. At least you remember your first aid training, because you don’t remember a damned thing about following orders.”

“As I said, Commandant, I was going to lose one of my crew.”

“You’re an officer. That’s your problem.” She suddenly turned away and examined the door from which Essa and Neela had just emerged. “And what were you doing in the command center?”

How did she know? Essa wondered. Before she could ask, Razia had pushed past her and opened the door. “Watch them,” she said to one of the commandos, who made Neela and Essa get up on their knees and put their hands on top of their heads, faced away from the interior of the room. 

Neela looked up at the commando, who kept her gun trained on them. “We need to get out of here,” she said. There’s something that’s going to collide with this station in less than two hours.” 

The commando didn’t react. 

“Where are you from?” Essa said. After that didn’t work, she said, “I used to live in a small town just outside of Armali. My mother designed prints for textiles.” After another pause, “You must like to get dressed up on your days off, don’t you? Do they even give you days—” 

The comando’s elbow stopped her sentence short. “Next one won’t just quiet you,” she said. 

“We’re all on the same side, here,” Neela said. “How about if you tell us what’s going on?”

“Maybe they won’t tell her,” Essa said. “Not important enough to know.”

The commando hit her again, and this time the pain exploded across Essa’s jaw. For a moment she thought the commando had broken it. One of her teeth felt loose, and a trickle of purple blood welled along her gums.

Essa spat it out onto the commando’s foot, just to see what she would do. She didn’t flinch or take a step back in revulsion. She didn’t appear to notice it at all. 

“How much longer are you going to keep us on our knees like this?” Neela said. “We need to get out of here.”

“So you say,” the commando said with a bloodthirsty grin. She looked like she was about to lash out again, but only pulled her weapon back in toward her body. In that moment, Essa saw everything as it should happen: she reached up and took the rifle, pulling it toward her. Surprised, the commando’s hand clenched around the trigger and she fired a shot into the floor. Essa wrenched the weapon around, and placing her knee beind the commando’s, pulled and shoved, and made her flail backwards, landing hard on the oxygen tanks of her suit. Not wasting any time, Essa dropped low and gave the commando two sharp blows from her elbow, and when these didn’t appear to do the trick, two more that made her expression turn blank and her limbs go slack. 

This, she thought later, was what she should have done, but instead the moment passed. 

Commandant Razia was returning, in any event. She had a brief conversation with their guard, saying only, “We’ve got what we came for,” leaving Essa to wonder what that might mean. To Essa and Neela, she said, “Right. Get up, and show us how this vehicle works. We should get out of here quick as we can.”

“So you saw it, too?” Neela said, “The object approaching the station?”

Razia didn’t answer, but her impassive expression suggested that she had. 

The vehicle was big enough to hold them all, though it wobbled slightly whenever Essa tried to maneuver or accelerate. At least there was room for the commandos on the flatbed at the front of the little craft. They reached the end of the corridor, and came out into the ancient garden, where Essa deftly zipped up and over a mound of tangled roots, and began retracing the path she and Neela had followed on their way there. She began slowly, gaining speed as she gained in confidence. The vehicle shone a light that reached about twenty meters up ahead, and as Essa followed the track, she saw, and then attempted to swerve around something she thought she had seen running across their path. The craft spun, slipped sideways and struck a tree, throwing the commandos to the ground and slamming Essa’s face against the controls. 

Neela had split her lip open, and Essa felt like she’d broken her nose. A long trail of blood had formed in the time it took her to regain her senses. The commandos were mostly unhurt, aside from one who said she’d blacked out when she hit the ground, and probably had a concussion. One of them had lost her weapon. 

“Search for it, and quickly,” Razia said. “We don’t have long—”

Everyone fanned out, and there in the lights from the hovercraft, was the thing Essa had swerved to avoid. Arms and legs, frozen in motion, one hand stretched out, as though reaching for something, the other, snapped off, legs bent slightly as though about to leap forward. Decapitated. 

A statue. Perhaps representing the creatures that had built this place, though the body was ambiguous enough that it could still have been an asari, at least a small-breasted one. The broken arm lay at the base of the pedestal, but the head had been carried elsewhere. 

The commando called out that she’d found her rifle. As she said this, the star that hung in the void above them glowed brighter, turning the twilight into day. Looking up, Essa saw that the two rings that held the star in place were turning much faster than they had been, were in fact, spinning so fast she could almost no longer see them. Razia looked up, her command presence suddenly broken. Everyone did the same. 

A hum rose up through the ground and the trees and earth shook, filling the air with dust. A few moments later the sound became deafening, and the light nearly blinded them. The whirling rings disappeared, and what looked like a massive lightning bolt shot from the star out into space. The noise peaked and as it dropped away, Essa glimpsed a dark shape, lit by the energy passing into it that then hurtled away down the long rail of the station and vanished into the dark of space. 

“What the devil was that?” said one of the commandos. 

“I saw it, too,” said another. “I think it was a ship.”

No one answered, but just stared on in awe and the sort of terror reserved for things beyond all understanding.


	8. Foundations

Liara reached the dig site in half an hour. The remains of the demolished skyscraper were still being hauled away by a steady stream of shuttles that quickly rose from the ward and merged with the traffic heading up-arm, toward the processing center near Zakera Junction. Alera let her out, and flew away at once. The landing pad was in constant use. Liara hurried down into the interior of the building and met with the foreman, a young quarian, wearing a helmet to protect from falling debris, and a dusty coverall, but no envirosuit or rebreather gear. The quarian was gray-skinned, his large eyes fixing her with obvious intelligence. He several visible implants in his temples and chin and had several earrings in each ear. 

Liara still smiled, seeing a barefaced quarian, even though they were becoming a common fixture on the Citadel. They’d even been granted an advisory—which is to say non-voting—seat on the council, along with the krogan and volus, who had received similar honors in the years following the war. 

“Gell vas Mesto,” he said—Mesto being the quarian word for Citadel—holding out his hand, then said, “Something funny?” 

“No,” Liara said, thinking of Tali’Zorah, who, near the end of her life had finally been able to take off the mask for good. “You remind me of an old friend. That’s all.”

Gell led her downward, on a long flight of makeshift stairs that swithced back and forth across the wall of what had once been the building’s foundations. Debris lay scattered everywhere, and water leaked from old pipes into the pit below them. 

“As I was saying,” Gell began, though Liara didn’t remember him having begun any explanation earlier, “It’s not uncommon to find interesting stuff buried like this on the Citadel. It’s just we usually dig it up before it gets to be a thousand years old.”

“That old?”

Gell nodded. “It’s dated. Eight hundred seventy-three years ago, by the old Asari calendar.”

“What is it you found?” Liara said. 

“Looks like a time capsule. Old keepsakes and the like. Insignia from different military units. Probably no one would have thought twice about it, but then we noticed the two data storage pods. That’s how we know how old the thing is. We haven’t seen tech like that since—well ever. Honestly it’s so old you can’t even call it tech anymore. It’s more like junk the protheans would have thrown away.”

“I’ve got a doctorate in things the protheans threw away,” Liara said, patting the quarian’s shoulder to let him know she understood what he’d meant. “Do the data pods still work?”

Gell shrugged. “The container stayed sealed, so they weren’t damaged beyond what you’d expect. I’m guessing you’re going to need specialized equipment to read them. Can’t just plug them into your omni tool.”

“Thank you, Gell,” Liara said. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to see the location where you found it.”

Gell pointed down below, where there were at least two meters of standing water. “Diggers broke through a pipe. The whole subbasement filled up. I’m afraid you can’t get down there, and demolition is going to continue on, water or no. Best I can do right now is hand over the capsule itself. We made sure to seal it back up for you.”

“And how did you know to contact me?” she said. 

Gell led Liara to the workbench where the capsule was had been laid out for her. “There’s one other thing stamped into the capsule. It reads, ‘Buried on this day by Benezia T’Soni.’”

#

Liara brought the capsule back to her apartment on Tayseri. It wasn’t very large, about the size of three or four books stacked together, and no heavier. A series of bolts held it shut and its interlocking lid kept it sealed against the elements. Gell had opened it, and this bothered her. She was used to being the first to look at important information, and who knew what Gell had seen that she shouldn’t have, or tampered with, or destroyed. Even assuming he were completely honest and forthright, the way things were arranged inside the container might have held a particular meaning that would now be entirely lost. 

Her apartment occupied the top two floors of one of the taller structures on the ward, not far from Tayseri Point. From there, she could look out in one direction and see an endless stream of ships forming up to dock, and in the other, the long shadow the Presidium Tower cast over the wards. Liara stopped to look out the windows. Tayseri was passing through darkness as the Citadel rotated. It was never really night here, and the Wards never slept. Traffic buzzed at all hours, and up here one was never very far away from Widow’s warming light. Down below things were different, where the lower wards were in a state of constant dusk. She stepped closer to the window and put her hand up to the glass, something she rarely did, ever since the attempt on her life, centuries ago now, back when she and Shepard were still hunting for the Shadow Broker. Before she’d taken his place. Before Shepard had vanished into a beam of energy and somehow made the reapers go away. 

Liara imagined someone still might want to put a bullet in her head, but the barriers on this apartment were an order of magnitude stronger than what she’d had on Illium. They had to be. 

It had been a long time, though, since someone had tried to kill her. Perhaps Shepard—or the memory she’d had in Shepard’s Field—had been right. Perhaps it was time to move on. 

Liara went downstairs, to the windowless interior room where Alera had placed the capsule on a workbench. She unscrewed the bolts and raised the lid. She found the contents as Gell had left them—hastily put back after realizing what he’d found. There were two pouches, each containing unit patches from three or four different military and paramilitary organizations. All of them had formed on Thessia, and most of them were from what had once been the Serrice Protectorate before the galactic expansion had given a kind of unity to the city-states. Which was to say, they were all very old. Most of the units had existed for generations before the discovery of the relays, and all but one had been either disbanded or merged with other outfits by the end of the Krogan Rebellions. Valueless in themselves, they seemed like an odd sort of keepsake for her mother to try to pass on.

Underneath these Liara found the data pods. Their power cells had oxidized and started to leak. She didn’t hold out much hope that the data would be fully intact. Liara still went through the motions, connecting cables and flipping on her omni-tool. She was surprised to learn that both were operational, one apparently serving as a backup for the other. 

Each contained a brief video recording of her mother. She opened the viewer, but left the image frozen before Benezia began to speak. There she was, her mother, two hundred and eighty-three years old, younger than Liara was now, and too much like her: unbonded, childless. Too mixed up in politics—among other things—to settle down and become a proper matron. Liara had always admired that about Benezia, even when it made her an uninvolved, aloof, and finally absentee mother. There she was in her office in Armali. Liara knew the room well, the shelves behind her, laden with books and keepsakes. Liara had encountered her first prothean artifacts there, most of them just broken fragments of their lost civilization, but then there was a data disk, too. Unreadable, but fascinating, nonetheless. 

Liara had always suspected that her mother was involved in much more than just policy, but she’d never known for certain. Not until she’d put three bullets into her mother’s chest and watched her die. This capsule seemed like proof, and the video file a confession.

Liara decided to wait a moment, to just sit there on the threshold of the revelation before diving in and knowing for certain. After a few deep breaths, she was ready, and allowed the video to play. Benezia didn’t begin to speak right away, but instead stared into the camera for a few moments, apparently contemplating what she was about to tell her listener. 

“This is a puzzle,” she began. “One I haven’t been able to figure out, and one I won’t have time to understand. Circumstances. And I’ve been warned to—to mind my own business.” After a pause, she said, “The warnings I’ve received have been sufficient to keep me silent in this—in this lifetime.” She went on, “Even now I’m perhaps afraid to say too much, except that I’ve discovered—something. I don’t know what it means. Not yet.” She sighed and shook her head. “But then, tell me not to ask questions and it only makes me curious.” 

The video cut out, and at first Liara thought there wouldn’t be any more. Then the image came back. It was a different day, or at least Benezia had changed clothing, and looked even more troubled than before. “I’ve found it,” she said. Liara studied the background when Benezia moved to the side. The weather had changed, because behind now rain was pelting the windows. A different day, for certain. “Not it. Not the answer. But a clue of sorts.” She let out a sigh and appeared to calm down. “It doesn’t matter. I’m being sent to Esan in the Omega Nebula. I imagine this is to keep me out of the way. Whoever you are that finds this, you’ll find my next package there.” 

The video stopped. A data file that opened automatically marked the coordinates of the colony. 

Esan didn’t exist any more. The batarians had occupied and annexed the asari territory three hundred years earlier, and eventually renamed the planet Lorek. A bloodless invasion, a rarity for batarians. But the Hegemony was too economically dependent on the slave trade for things to have ended well for the asari who didn’t have the means to get offworld. 

And now, of course, there precious little left of the Hegemony after the reaper invasion. Their fleets destroyed, their central government indoctrinated and then wiped out during the war, their colonial populations wiped out or scattered. Their capital, Khar’Shan was said to be a world of ghosts and ashes. They were rarely seen in Citadel space. And as much as Liara hated to see an entire race nearly eliminated from the galaxy, it had—for a time at least—made life in the Attican Traverse considerably safer for other species. 

There had never been an official accounting of what had happened on Lorek. Unconfirmed reports said the colony had been entirely abandoned when the war hit. Who knew what Liara might find there. 

Liara searched the remaining files on the data pod. Most of them contained information regarding the units whose insignia were contained in the capsule. Much of that information was redacted, leaving Liara to wonder whether the First Serrice Guards had engaged in a joint exercise with the Special Tasks Group, fought against them, or whether they’d been involved in covert action together. 

#

Liara got up from the workbench and walked upstairs to look out the windows again. There she found Alera, who had laid a cloth out on the kitchen table and was taking apart the SMG she kept hidden under her coat. 

“Sorry, boss,” she said, clicking the pieces back together and holstering the weapon. She folded the cloth and returned it to her pocket.

Liara didn’t say anything. Instead she went to the windows again. I dare you to try shooting me, she thought, looking out at the nearest building, all the many windows where a shooter might be lying in wait.

Alera said, “The councilor called. She wanted to know if you’d discovered anything interesting.”

Liara shook her head. “Nothing yet,” she said. She had learned over the years that it was best not to burden her associates with too much information. It would only put them in danger. More danger, she reminded herself.

The brief sunset created by the Citadel’s rotation made her feel like she wanted get out and stretch her legs, perhaps do something a normal asari might do. Go to the lower wards with a friend and have dinner, for instance. Or browse the shops and arcades in Lower Tayseri. She knew it wasn’t entirely safe, but on occasion she’d done it, and once had even, in spite of her better instincts, gone dancing. She knew how to handle herself, she thought. Liara turned to Alera and said, “Let’s get out of here.”

#

The lower wards had been buried in rubble for years after the final assault on the Citadel. No one would ever know that looking at them now. They’d been rebuilt, most of them in the same style—if not the same exact shapes—as they had been before the war. Traffic roared overhead, and the walkways were crowded with foot traffic, delivery drones, and wheeled vehicles. 

Liara hadn’t been down here, except for the rare expedition to meet a contact, in over a year. Before going out, she’d applied facial markings, adding a pale green stripes that extended from her eyes out toward her ears, and up from her chin around her mouth. They wouldn’t fool facial recognition software, but it would make her less recognizable to casual observers. It was—barring hacking C-Sec’s monitoring systems, or radical plastic surgery—the only way to enjoy even a little anonymity on the station. 

Alera, walking slightly ahead of Liara, hand touching the opening of her coat, a quick reach away from her weapon, said over her shoulder, “What’s the plan?”

Liara smiled. She said, “I’m tempted to give you the night off.”

“I’m serious. What are we doing here?”

“Alera,” Liara said. “Don’t you ever do anything fun?”

“Never, boss,” she said, though she was smiling. 

“We’ll have to do something about that,” Liara said. Alera’s omni-tool pinged. 

“It’s Gell,” she said. “Says he has something for you.” Liara motioned to put him through. 

“Doctor T’Soni?” Gell said, once they were connected. Liara stepped into a narrow alley off the main thoroughfare. On balconies above her, laundry that had been hung out to dry floated in in the artificial breeze. Once she felt no one was watching, she motioned for Gell to continue. “We managed to get the subbasement pumped out,” he said. “Since you were so interested in looking at the location where we found that—that thing—I thought I’d go have another look.”

“What did you find?” 

He sent her half a dozen images to examine. “As you can see, it was crammed into a pretty tight space. She must have put it here when the building was still going up. But I crawled into the pit and shone my light around. If you look closely, you can see there’s something on the wall here.”

Liara studied the image. “I don’t see anything,” she said. 

“I thought you’d say that,” Gell said. “So I moved my light around. Here it is again from a different angle.”

Liara looked. Something was stenciled onto the wall with a kind of paint that only appeared when the light hit it at a certain angle. Commandos and the intelligence services had been using this marking system for centuries already, mostly for identifying buildings or rooms where targets were located, or, on a more limited scale, for marking dead drops. It meant that her mother had been using known dead drop locations, which would help limit her search when she got to Lorek. The mark itself was a simple combination of numbers, 303. Easy to overlook, but hard to mistake, if you knew what you were looking for. The number was an asari intelligence services designation, largely unused in the last several generations, signifying handwritten ciphers and codes. Liara made a note of that, wondering if Gell knew any of this, and said, “Thank you, Gell. Let me know if you find anything more.”

Alera stood waiting for Liara in the shadows nearest the head of the alley. “Important?” she said. 

Liara nodded. “We’re leaving tonight. Have the ship ready.”

Alera nodded, then made a subtle gesture. “We’ve acquired a few friends,” she said. She wasn’t looking directly at them, but two humans, a man and a woman Liara had noticed earlier had stopped walking and were leaning on the railing that overlooked the level below. 

“I wonder what they want?”

“We could ask them,” Alera said, balling her hand into a fist. 

“No,” Liara said. “Likely they’ll have backup, probably circling in a vehicle overhead.” Alera nodded in agreement. “Let’s take them dancing.”

“Humans can’t dance.”

“Then we’ll have to teach them,” Liara said. “But let’s give them a little show, first.”

Alera smiled, and playing the part of the good girlfriend, embraced Liara as they reached the head of the alley, two lovers who couldn’t wait to get home before embracing eternity. Liara pretended to check the zips on her tunic and touched Alera’s chin before they both stepped out onto the walkway, and disappeared into the foot traffic that in the lower wards never seemed to end.


	9. Two Mutinies

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *I've edited this to fix a pretty big error I found after posting it, and took out a few typos.

By Essa’s clock, they had spent close to fifteen hours aboard the installation. It took them eleven more to catch up to the Nixia. For the first time in many years, she felt strange going aboard a ship, as though she didn’t belong there. Only the second mate had come to greet them inside the airlock, and she and Neela had to help each other get out of their space suits. The second mate said they were off duty until their next rotation, and so Essa was on her way down to the crew deck to get some food and find a suitable sleeping bag, when the captain pinged her. 

“I need to speak with you,” she said, her voice level as always, betraying no sign of anger over the disobeyed orders. “Particle lab, half an hour.” Essa gathered, that the claws would come out when they met face to face on the science deck. The incident with the launch, the disobeyed orders—even though they had likely saved Talira’s life. It was likely she could expect more than just a reprimand. She felt the lieutenant’s tabs on her collar, and the patch on her shoulder that marked her as the ship’s executive officer. A chill went through her, realizing she might be asked to remove them. 

#

Essa made sure that Talira was resting comfortably in med bay, before she went to the science deck. The Nixia had recovered the probe during the last rotation, and now the science deck was teeming with crew from all three watches, all of them grouped around different displays showing data from the probe’s time in the Orisoni system. Neela sat watching her team reconstructing the flight data. As Essa came near, Neela reached out and took her hand. 

“We have over four billion images,” she said, beside herself. “We’re going to stitch them together to create video to show the people back home.” She put an arm around Essa’s waist and pulled her across the compartment to another screen. “Look at these,” she said, pointing at half a dozen still images. There, Essa saw, was a planet that looked a lot like Thessia. Streaks and swirls of white clouds, blue oceans, continents covered in green and brown, and speckled with mountains. Several closer images showed lakes and rivers, bordered by what looked like forests. She and Neela exchanged a look. 

“Habitable,” Essa said, her voice only a whisper. She was thinking of the installation, and the creatures that had built it, two toes, three fingers and a thumb, a statue with no head. 

“Not just habitable,” Neela said. “Inhabited.” 

Essa studied the images again. “I don’t see any settlements,” she said. “I wonder—”

Her thought was cut short by the captain. Who, without preamble took her into the particle lab, left empty by the commotion caused by the probe’s recent capture. Essa took hold of a rail stationed by one of the work surfaces and waited for the captain to speak. 

Only the captain seemed at a loss for words. She looked, in fact, like a shell of her former self. Somewhere between at loose ends and terrified for her own safety. At last she spoke, “We will deal with your disobedience when we return to High Rock,” she said. “In the meantime, there are other more pressing issues we are facing.”

Essa nodded. She’d entered the lab prepared to be stripped of rank and duties, removed from the bridge, and sent below to await the return home for her eventual court martial. That may still come, but in the meantime at least she would have something to keep her busy. 

“While you were out of contact, we received orders to capture the probe. There was nothing out of the ordinary there.” Here she paused and swallowed. “You may understand that I was somewhat reluctant to leave our station, because we were aware of your medical emergency. I thought it prudent to radio back to High Rock and receive advice. After all, the lag we would experience in receiving their decision didn’t matter. Two hours more of waiting would have only brought the probe nearer to our relative position.” The captain sighed, remembering something unpleasant. She said, “A few minutes after we sent the transmission, the commandos summoned me down to the crew deck. They were armed, and Razia’s second in command reminded me I had been given an order. She asked whether I intended to follow it. Never mind that they had just made it clear they’ve been monitoring all our communications, I told them I had radioed for clarification, and would abide by whatever orders I received at that time.” The captain tilted her head back and showed a bandage she was wearing at the base of her skull. “You can see what they thought of my plan. They timed it perfectly, on third watch, when everyone was sleeping. They subdued me, cuffed me and told me I’d been relieved of command. According to them, Commander Razia is now in charge of this mission.”

“That’s mutiny,” Essa said. 

The captain shrugged. “It is, but they’re keeping it quiet. I myself have been released and am free to move about the ship, provided I do not interfere, and that I stay off the flight deck. If anyone asks, I’m supposed to say I’ve been asked to assist with evaluation of the probe.”

“I gather I’m relieved as well?” Essa said. 

The captain nodded. “Yes.” 

“Who is running the flight deck, then?” 

“Navigation and Sensors are as they were. Apparently they’re loyal to this cause. I’m not entirely sure how, but the remainder of the deck officers are loyal to them. Second mate, too.”

“They’ll pay for this.”

The captain shook her head. “I don’t think they will. What we’ve found out here—” the captain gestured, throwing herself off balance. For a moment she drifted before bracing herself against the padded ceiling of the compartment. “What we’ve found here—it’s too important. Any other issues, including my relief from command, your disobedience, the damage to the launch, I gather they will all disappear amid the noise.” 

“Razia doesn’t seem the kind to sacrifice you for the sake of her own career,” Essa said. “I suppose I shouldn’t put it past her.” 

The captain shook her head. “This is bigger than a single officer’s career. Serrice High Command has their hand in it. I don’t understand their game, but I got a look at what’s been going on down in the cargo bay for the past month. They’ve built up the cradle that holds the probe, constructed a new bracing and a new frame. But there’s more, too. Power conduits and plasma tubes.”

It didn’t make sense to Essa. “Conduits running from the reactor? Perhaps they mean to run power to the probe in case its own fuel cells fail.”

“No, lieutenant. The conduits and tubes run toward our reactor. The tubes have unidirectional valves, and I inspected a few of them. I don’t know what they’re doing. I want you to take Neela down there. Tell her to make up some reason or another. She’s in charge of the probe anyhow, so you should be able to get them to let her down there. See what you can figure out about what they’re up to.” 

“Understood.”

“Take this.” The captain handed over an access card. “I took this while I was below decks a few days ago. You’ll be able to enter the bay without raising any alarms.” 

Essa nodded. “We’ll go when the rotations switch again. Things will have settled by then.” 

#

The Nixia had orders to return to High Rock, and the ship came about and executed a three-hour burn, the first of about a dozen that would eventually put them on a return path. They would pass within a million kilometers of the installation. 

Essa spent the time talking with Neela, who sat rapt over her data. The probe had found three other planets, beyond the one that looked habitable. The planets had been documented previously with land-based telescopes, but now Neela could put a face on them, as she said, adjusting her spectacles.

“We’re going to have to name them,” she said, smiling. 

When the watch changed five hours later, Essa was still on the science deck, hovering close to the console where Neela was working, evaluating the data the probe had collected. The images it had taken were slowly compiling into a composite video, and while that was running in the background, she spent her time trying to determine how quickly the probe had actually crossed the three light-years between the Parnitha and Orisoni systems. It appeared that the probe had made the journey in less than three weeks. 

“I wonder if we could survive acceleration like that,” Neela said.

Essa shrugged. She was staring, transfixed at the images of the blue-white world, now turning slowly, a storm raging across the day-side. Then, as the planet rotated, the skies cleared and there was a coastline, a river delta, and a deep valley. The science deck was clearing out. Everyone had been working for a full day or more. Two of the crew, giddy with excitement, were playfully tugging at each other’s clothing as they floated up the companionway to the crew deck. 

“Glad to see someone’s going to get a little azure tonight,” Neela said. 

Essa shook her head, “Let’s focus.” 

They slid down the tunnel to engineering and then the aft observation post, encountering no one. At the hatch to the cargo bay, Essa tapped her card against the lock and it slid open. Neela pulled the hatch open and immediately went in. Essa followed her. 

Neither of them made it very far into the bay, their path blocked by the probe, its cradle, and the network of power conduits and tubes leading from it. The two extra scientists who had come aboard were working at a console far below. 

Essa and Neela made their way around the other side of the probe, using it as cover. Neela found a good place to peer out and watch, while Essa got a closer look at the work the technicians had done. Below the console, six of the ten commandos were asleep in bags they had strapped to the bottom of the cargo bay. 

Essa picked her way down the back of the probe. Most of the conduits seemed to converge here. The probe had a drive system filled with roughly a ton of the mineral common on Thessia. While many of the mineral’s properties were already well known, one thing that had only recently been discovered was that pumping electricity through it proved to be a reliable source of antiprotons, the annihilation of which was an efficient way to generate electrical power, and made a potent propellant for spacecraft. This was how the probe achieved such speeds. Now, though, it looked as though they had not only wired the probe’s power generator into the Nixia’s reactor, but connected the annihilation drive to the ship’s main engines as well. What’s more, is the framing they had used to surround the probe’s cradle indicated that they meant to test that connection, so that the force generated by the probe’s main thrusters would not tear it loose inside the cargo bay and send it careening upward through the rest of the ship. 

Essa pulled herself up to where Neela was hiding and tapped her. “We need to tell the captain about this,” she said. “Right now.”

“We have a problem,” Neela whispered. While Essa had been inspecting the probe, Razia and the remaining commandos had returned. They were hovering in the open space between the hatch and the top of the probe and didn’t seem to be in any hurry to move out of the way. They appeared to be discussing something.

Essa and Neela floated closer, stopping behind a wide panel of shielding that kept them out of view, but that let them approach within hearing. One of the commandos was talking about a headcount. 

“We went through the crew deck.”

“And?”

“Two short,” she said. “There were several empty bags, but it appears several of the crew are sharing.”

“And you checked the launch?”

“Yes. It’s empty, as are the exterior storage pods.”

“Look again,” Razia said. “They have to be somewhere. But keep it quiet. I don’t want to upset the crew any more than we have to.”

The commandos made ready to leave, but Razia called them back. “Bring me the captain. I think she might know where they’ve gone.”

“Aye, aye.” The commandos disappeared through the hatch.

Neela squeezed Essa’s arm. “She knows we’re here.”

Essa shook her head. Just then the lights flickered. Essa whispered, “She knows we’re coming. She doesn’t know we’re here.”

The lights dimmed again, and Razia who now hovered alone in the space between the hatch and the probe took hold of the wall and spun herself around, trying to look over her shoulder. One of the scientists called out from down below, and Razia shifted around, moving out of Essa’s view. 

She turned and signaled to Neela, who already looked ready to move. Razia had floated downward. If they were careful they could slip by her unnoticed. Neela went first, gliding like a fish up toward the hatch and then through, without making a sound. The lights flickered again, dimmed, then came all the way back on. Razia looked behind her again before she went back to addressing the tech.

Essa saw her chance. Pushing off, perhaps not hard enough. She had almost reached the hatch, her fingers were just closing on the rail beside the circular opening when a hand reached up and caught her foot. 

“I knew it!” Razia shouted. Her grasp made Essa spin out of control and crash into the pads around the hatch opening. Somehow she managed to maintain hold on the rail. She tried to kick Razia away. “Let me show you how to fight!”

Razia lashed out with both her arms, shouting a keening battle cry as she did. Two blows landed, one in Essa’s ribs, the other against her tensed abdomen. The air left her lungs in a rush, but she quickly recovered, grabbing hold of Razia’s arm, and pulling her in close, she spun the commandant’s body around, and took her in a chokehold. 

Slowly, like a snake crushing its prey, she increased the pressure. “Struggling will only make it worse,” Essa whispered as Razia slowly fell into unconsciousness. When the commandant’s body went slack, she counted to five before letting go. Essa shoved her away. As she did, the lights went out entirely. 

Essa had drifted away from the hatch, but still had a sense of where it was. Her feet touched something solid, and she pushed away. An emergency light came on as she rose up into the aft observation compartment. Neela, she was pleased to see, had not bothered waiting for her, but instead had continued on. Essa hoped she had found a good place to hide. In engineering, only the red emergency lights were working, and a single screen showed that the entire computer system had apparently crashed and was attempting to restart. The screen kept printing the same thirty lines of code over and over, never getting past that first sequence.

She didn’t have time to see if the backup generators were operating properly. Razia wouldn’t be out for long. 

Things were similar on the science deck. All the screens were flashing the same message. Essa searched the sleeping bags hung on the walls to see if Neela had found a place to hide from the commandos, but she didn’t find her. The emergency lighting had woken up some of the scientists, and one of them called out as Essa made for the companionway, “Lieutenant, what’s happening?”

Essa didn’t answer but said, “Have you seen any of the commandos?”

“I—”

The ship’s automated voice interrupted. “All hands, all hands. This is a general distress warning. Main power failure in central reactor. This is not a drill. All hands, all hands, report to general quarters stations at this time.”

Essa pushed herself up, through the hatch to the crew deck. Same emergency lights, same screens showing the same system failure up here. 

Except the commandos were there, and had taken hold of Neela and the captain. The lights came back on, and went out again. The ship seemed to shudder, and there was a loud pop from a maneuvering thruster. In the total black, Essa heard a scuffle, several blows, then the compartment seemed to explode in a ball of blue fire. For an instant the light burned the image of the captain being thrown backward while one of the commandos hit her with a burst of biotic energy. Ranged along the wall behind the commandos, a dozen shocked faces of personnel who only a few minutes earlier had been sleeping. Through the darkness, a body came flying, hit Essa square in the chest, and threw her against the back wall. She was pinned for a moment, before struggling to breathe she managed to push the body away. And then they were on top of her, fists and feet, elbows and knees striking her everywhere she wasn’t protected, her ribs, her belly, her face. Her already broken nose broke again. 

Suddenly the lights came on. In the moment it took everyone to get their bearing the ship seemed to roll out from underneath them, reorienting the room. The intercom spoke again.

“All hands, all hands. Main power restored. Secure for acceleration. This is not a drill. Thirty seconds. All hands, all hands, secure for acceleration.”

The commandos looked like they wanted to continue fighting, but broke off and made for the nearest rank of seats. Essa grabbed Neela, who looked stunned, but not unconscious, and helped her buckle in. She had just finished strapping herself in—nineteen seconds left, according to the ship’s clock on the far bulkhead—when she realized the captain wasn’t there. 

Essa keyed her communicator. “Captain. Where are you?” 

“I’m headed below to find out what this bitch from Serrice is trying to do to us.”

Essa reached for the buckle on her own straps. Twelve seconds. She sprang forward, past the rank of commandos into the long tunnel that connected to the flight deck. Maybe she could stop them from initiating the burn sequence. 

There were no clocks in the tunnel, only the count she maintained in her head, and the silent anticipation of what was coming, as she flew up the ladder. Ten rungs left, eight seconds, two rungs, six seconds, at the hatch, three seconds, through the hatch and onto the deck, two seconds, finding the crew struggling to regain control of the ship. In the moment it took Essa to hurl herself into the captain’s chair, the only available seat, she saw the second mate pulling the MASTER ABORT lever. 

It didn’t work. The engines roared to life. Essa felt the acceleration pushing her body off the seat, and with a final effort she forced the straps around her shoulders and waist and shut the buckle. 

She called over the comm. “Captain?” 

There was a short burst of static and perhaps the sound of shouting, then nothing. All further attempts to raise the captain were met with silence. 

“What’s happening here?” Essa said to the second mate. 

“We’re don’t know!” she shouted. “The computers went down, the power cut out. It seemed like all of our systems were resetting themselves, but then—she waved her hands at the nav computer—“It’s like it didn’t just restart, but reset already programmed and ready to set a new course.”

“Send a distress call,” Essa said. 

The second mate looked at her panel. “Can’t,” she said. “The radio is down. We’re already broadcasting a signal on our narrow band array.” 

“Shut it off,” Essa said. 

After studying her console for a few more seconds, the second mate said, “Nothing’s responding.” She flipped a switch so they could listen over the ship’s internal speakers. The sound itself wasn’t as surprising as the fact that Essa had heard it before. She’d heard in the control room, less than a day earlier.

She called for the captain again, and again there was no answer. The Nixia continued accelerating, its throttles fully open. 

Then the maneuvering jets fired, throwing Essa off balance. She wondered if the Nixia’s frame could handle the stresses. The signal they were broadcasting changed, the pattern of growls shortening and becoming more repetitive. To the second mate she said, “What is controlling the ship?”

“I don’t know,” she said, “but it’s not us.” 

The sensors operator cried out, “Collision warning!”

Through the slit of glass, Essa looked out and saw the installation. They were approaching it end-on, perhaps as little as a thousand kilometers away. The little blue star glowed brightly now, and she thought she saw the rings spinning faster and faster. 

She was watching the readout at the second mate’s station. It, too, continued to show a repetitive code fragment. Essa wondered if that little loop of information was supposed to prevent the crew from interacting with the controls, while what ever was about to happen happened. 

She sat watching the installation growing larger and larger in the windscreen, until it blotted out everything around it and was the only visible object in their sky. 

She asked the sensors operator for the range. They were within ten kilometers of it now. It wouldn’t be long, Essa thought. The acceleration held her pinned. A thin line of blood leaked from her twice-broken nose, and made her cough. She gasped, and spat, and then there was a flash of light and she thought they were all dead, because she and the ship and everyone in it seemed to stop existing, because they were not just weightless, but had no physical form and the stars seemed to jump from one place to another, and she saw Neela smiling at her from behind her spectacles, and wondered why she hadn’t thought about Neela that way before, because clearly Neela thought that way about her. 

And then they were adrift again. There was her body, there was the crew, and the Nixia riding along underneath her. Essa coughed and gagged again on her blood. She undid her straps and drifted up into the cabin as the intercom, unbidden, spoke the All Clear. 

The navigator had passed out, and the second mate was wiping her hand across her mouth as though she’d vomited. The panels had returned to their normal operational status: no more code fragments looping, just the standard readouts. 

Essa opened a channel on the intercom. Wiping the blood from her nose, she spoke, “All hands, all hands. This is your XO speaking. Report to action stations for damage control and assessment. The time is currently—” she stopped to look at her watch “—seventeen fifty-one. Section heads report to crew deck by eighteen hundred hours.” She closed the intercom, and ordered the second mate to send a distress call to High Rock. 

Over her own comm, she tried the captain again. Instead she got Razia. “Lieutenant,” she said, “I have some bad news. Your captain is dead.”


	10. Afterlife

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Liara visits with Aria on Omega.

It was impossible to travel through the Omega-2 relay without stopping to pay homage to Aria. Liara would have preferred not to dock and make the long pilgrimage to Afterlife. She didn’t hate the Omegans, not all of them, but she hated the filth and the poverty and the violence. She was thinking about this last thing as she rode a public shuttle, thronging with passengers, some of them even hanging off the sides of the aging shuttle, by holding on to jerry-rigged handholds bolted to the exterior, as it flew through one of the many hollowed-out galleries inside the ancient asteroid. The slums spread along the bottoms of the depleted mine pits, climbing the sloping walls, not unlike the favelas she’d seen in Rio, only here they seemed even more grim, perhaps because there was no daylight, or night, just the perpetual insufficient glow of artificial illumination. Down below, the different species had separated into enclaves: humans and turians lived in this gallery for the most part. The salarians and asari lived in others, all just as bad.

They passed over a gang of krogan Enforcers—the paramilitary unit Aria had created after her return to Omega—who were surrounding a storefront. They all wore black and yellow uniforms, and the civilians referred to them—quietly—as hornets. They were notorious for using deadly force as a first option. 

The shuttle paused to let people off, and jostled as it rose from the stop. Liara bumped against one of the passengers; he patted down his pockets to make sure she hadn’t relieved him of his valuables before returning to his datapad. Meanwhile, children ran up and down the aisle, pushing between the standing passengers, shouting, laughing.

It was always like this. Aria loved to make sure Liara knew her place: requiring her to dock her ship far below, in Omega’s keel, instead of the much closer central hub. And of course, Liara had to come alone—no hired muscle, as per Aria’s instructions. 

She might have felt threatened, but Liara saw that at least three of the passengers were plainclothes thugs. They were there to both make sure Liara didn’t stray from her prescribed path, and also that she didn’t come to any harm. She was safe, but not trusted. Too important to kill, too dangerous to leave alone. 

After another half an hour in transit, Liara was finally at the central station in the Gozu district, a short walk from Afterlife. The streets were different now. After the Cerberus War, as the locals called it, Aria had had a large number of buildings around the entrance to Afterlife demolished. Behind the nightclub’s thick walls, were hidden emplacements that provided overlapping fields of fire to troops working within. Approaching the building would be nearly impossible without taking massive casualties. Beyond the cleared zone, the old Gozu had been leveled and rebuilt. The new buildings, already dirty, were still less shabby than the ones that had come before. The streets leading through the district, though, were a maze, another defensive measure of Aria’s: blind alleys, narrow zig zag streets that ended in choke points that would only allow a trickle of attackers to pass through. 

She made her way to the front entrance, where the bouncers—a batarian in body armor, and a turian wearing civilian clothing—gave her a quick look and then a nod. The people standing in the line that stretched some distance down the block grumbled and shuffled in place, while the armored batarian roared for them to shut up as the doors closed behind her.

Aria was in her usual place, her command center, conferring with her lieutenants. Liara waited while the bodyguard patted her down, giving her bottom a pinch as he finished. Liara glared at him. 

“Do that again,” she said, “and they’ll be digging your teeth out of the walls, human.” A little blue flare of energy flickered at the tip of her index finger. He only stepped aside and hefted his rifle, as Liara mounted the sairs.

Aria saw her coming, but made no motion to greet her. 

“Aria,” Liara said. “It’s been a long time.”

“Maybe it has for you.” Hostile as always. Hostile as a default. “What brings you to Omega?” Still not looking up. 

“It must be the weather,” Liara said. She sat down, not bothering to wait for Aria to offer.

“I liked it better when that human bondmate of yours was still running around, doing my errands for me.” Aria leaned back and looked out over the crowd spread out over the dance floor below. “Why should I help you, though. You’ve never done anything for me. You even used to turn my own men against me.”

Liara shrugged. “It’s true. I did.” After a pause, she said, “I don’t regret it. And in any event, I didn’t come to ask for help. I assumed you needed my assistance.”

Aria laughed. “Impertinent girl,” she said. “It will be a dark day on Omega if I ever find myself coming to you for help.”

“I know there were more than a few of those during the war,” Liara said. 

“And yet here I am,” Aria said, spreading her arms. This is mine, the gesture said. I know you want what I have. 

“I’ll ask you again,” she said. “What brings you here?”

“I suppose I could try telling you about how I’ve returned to my research.”

“That’s an amusing cover story,” Aria said. “I know it isn’t true.”

“Yes, well,” Liara said. “I’m on my way to Esan.”

“It’s been a long time since anyone’s called it by that name.”

“True enough,” Liara said. “I’m looking for something that was there long before the name changed.”

Aria sighed. “Good luck finding what you’re searching for,” she said. “I doubt you’ll have any luck. The batarian you saw at the door? He’s the grandson of one of the only families that escaped the reaper attack. There’s nothing there but ghosts and ashes.”

“We’ll see about that.”

“Do what you like. Just don’t bother me with it, and don’t let it blow back here. Respect those two things, and I’ll allow you to leave.”

Liara nodded. She rose to go, then stopped at the head of the stairs. “Aria,” she said, “I’ve always wondered, now that you’re—well, getting on in years—whether you’d given any thought to who might succeed you.” Aria glared and half moved to get up. Liara spread her hands apart. “It’s an honest question.”

“Telling the truth gets people dead,” Aria said. “You of all people should know that. Now, get the fuck out of here.” 

#

Liara returned to the central station to take the shuttle back to the lower docks. Her three watchers followed. Once they were aboard the shuttle, though, a curious thing happened. One by one, each got off the shuttle, and no one entered to replace them. 

So, Liara thought. Perhaps she’d touched a nerve, mentioning a successor, an heir. Not many knew that Aria had once had a daughter. Even fewer were foolish enough to mention her—even obliquely. Liselle had been murdered by her human lover some two centuries earlier. 

Now who or what did Aria have? An empire of sorts, a command structure she could dominate, but that wouldn’t hold once she was gone. Once Aria left Omega, either in a box or on her own two feet, the place—so everyone assumed—would descend again into chaos. And Aria was getting on, after all. No one knew her exact age, but she’d been running Omega for a good eight hundred years. Many estimates put her age at well over a thousand years old, making her one of the oldest living asari, and perhaps one of the oldest living individuals in the galaxy. 

Perhaps it had been foolish to challenge Aria like that, or perhaps it had been necessary, to see how she would react. In any event, Liara had learned something important by it. Aria really knew none of the details about her voyage to Esan, or Lorek as it was now called. It had been worth the risk to learn that much, to know that she was fumbling for information.

Now, though, her punishment was coming. 

Soon the shuttle would stop at the central hub. From there, Liara would have to transfer to a ferry that would fly her down to the moorings on the lower keel. Liara decided to get off before the final stop, but as she made for the front of the shuttle, two young turians, got to their feet and pushed her back toward a third, who had positioned himself behind her. Liara didn’t wait to see if they were armed, but instead turned to face the man who was behind her, and knocked him flat with a slash from her elbow. She dodged over his fallen body and toward the shuttle’s open rear door. 

It was too far to drop all the way to the rooftops below, but Liara wasn’t thinking about jumping. Instead she swung herself up, using the makeshift handrails, onto the shuttle’s roof. The turians didn’t bother following, but instead started trying to shoot her through hull. A few bullets made it through, but most of their shots ricocheted around the interior. One of them apparently struck the shuttle’s pilot, because the craft veered off course and began descending at a shallow angle toward the neighborhood below. 

She lost her footing, sliding toward the front of the shuttle. Now the turians were trying to scramble out, too. One fell, his body landing in the street a hundred meters below. The other made it to the roof. Liara looked to see if he was going to try and finish the job, but he was young, and apparently more concerned with saving himself. His mandibles flared in panic, as he scrambled to hold on. 

They didn’t have much time. The shuttle was less than twenty meters above the rooftops, and rocking violently back and forth as it struck an antenna attached to the roof of one of the taller structures. 

The shuttle veered to the left, into oncoming traffic. Down below was an open topped barge, its belly full of something that looked reasonably soft. The shuttle pitched downward again, and Liara, running upward, toward the back of the shuttle, tackled the turian, and together they tumbled downward, into the barge. 

They landed hard, enough to knock the wind out of her, but she wasn’t hurt otherwise. The barge was filled with compost bound for the reprocessing center. Excellent for absorbing the shock. In every other way unpleasant. Two blocks away, the shuttle crashed into a building with a sickening thud, and then a detonation that knocked Liara onto her back. 

She’d landed on top of the turian, and he’d taken most of the force of the impact. One of his mandibles was broken, and perhaps his leg, too. He groaned in pain, then, looking up and seeing Liara, flinched and covered his face. 

“I’m not going to hurt you,” she said, pulling him up by his collar. “Not any more than I already have.” 

He groaned again, and said, “All right. Now what?”

“This barge is an automated drone. We should be able to reprogram it to let us off nearby.” Liara got up and started for the back of the vessel, where the guidance systems were located. “By the way,” she said. “Your friends are dead. For your sake, I think it’s best if you disappear, too. Aria doesn’t take failure lightly.” She pulled open the panel to the guidance system, and flipped on her omni-tool. She directed the barge to a nearby terrace, from where they made their way inside, and down half a dozen flights of stairs. The turian’s leg wasn’t broken, but he wasn’t walking properly. 

“I can get you medical attention when we arrive at my ship,” Liara said. “But until then you have to keep up. I won’t hesitate to leave you behind.”

“Maybe you should have thought about that when you threw me off the shuttle,” the turian said. 

“I needed someone to break my fall.”

Out in the street, there were pieces of wreckage from the shuttle, rubble from a collapsed wall, and a mangled body thrown from the crash. Two dozen people, mostly turians and a salarian work crew, had come out to look at the ensuing fire, and some were getting organized to put it out. 

Liara saw the turian looking up at the burning building. A female turian jumped from the upper levels onto the awnings of the market stalls that lined the narrow street below. More followed her through the window. One of them missed and hit the pavement. Screaming.

“Is this your neighborhood?” Liara said. The turian nodded. She grabbed his arm and made him look at her. “I’m sorry. There’s nothing we can do. If you want to live you have to come with me.” He hesitated, then she said, “This way,” pulling him again, down an alleyway partially blocked off by a dumpster and empty carts. In the narrow dark, two vorcha whelps tumbled together, biting and scratching each other, lashing out with their claws. Clotheslines overhead kept out what little light that filtered in from the street. The vorcha went after the turian’s leg and he kicked them way. 

Liara picked her way down the alley as it jogged right and left, finally emerging into a small square built around a communal fountain. From this angle, she could see the hole the shuttle had made in the building. One of its winglets protruded from an apartment halfway up the six-level building. Above the third floor, black smoke mixed with bright flame. A truckload of Enforcers pulled up at the head of the square, forcing Liara to dive behind a column. The turian followed, favoring his leg. 

“You’d better not call out to them,” Liara said. 

“Don’t worry,” the turian said. 

Meanwhile the krogan dismounted from their vehicle, each one holding a heavy shotgun. A second vehicle pulled up, this one loaded with forced laborers. The krogan began pulling them from the back of the truck, shouting for them to get to work and firing shots in the air, in case it wasn’t already clear what failure to follow instructions might mean. 

Liara and the turian hurried down the next alleyway. The transit hub wasn’t far, but now Liara would need a way to get off Omega without being discovered. That would have been hard enough if she were on her own, but now she had the turian to worry about. 

“Are you armed?” she said. The turian reached inside his tunic and pulled out a small pistol. “Give it to me,” Liara said. He hesitated then turned the weapon around to hand it over, grip-first. “Wise choice, friend,” Liara said. There was more shooting behind them, and the sound of more vehicles arriving. Liara moved faster. Enforcers would be swarming the neighborhood to make certain she hadn’t survived the crash. 

The alley led into another small square, bordered by low storefronts. Beyond it was a district filled mostly with shabby warehouses, many of them looked abandoned. If they went there, the krogan wouldn’t have to be as careful about where they shot. They might even bring in a gunship or two. Liara crouched in the shadows, then started to break across the square. Just as she did, a vehicle flew low overhead. Several troops dropped out onto a rooftop nearby, then a few more onto one closer. There was shouting and loud crack. Nearby a window shattered. Liara ran now, forgetting the turian, and firing blindly over her head. She reached the next alley. The turian rolled in behind her. 

“Thanks for the covering fire,” he said. “Are you hurt?” 

“I’m fine.” Liara said, though she had a scratch on her neck. She peered out, drawing a salvo of small arms fire. They weren’t going to make it. Not running like this. She needed to think. She got up and pushed the turian down the alley. “They’ll have us surrounded in sixty seconds,” she said. “I need to know if you can move.” The turian nodded, saying that he could. “And you’re not wounded?” she said. 

“It’s hard to tell.” 

Liara found a door about halfway down the alley. She kicked it open and found that it led to an interior stairwell. She pulled the turian in and shut it behind her, gesturing for him to be silent, then began moving up the stairs. 

They needed a vehicle, she realized. They weren’t likely to find one unguarded in such a poor district. Until they did, they’d need to stay out of sight. Liara picked the building’s third floor, and left the stairwell, hurrying down the squalid tunnel of a corridor. 

They had a few minutes at the very most, Liara thought, to disappear. They could do it, slip beyond the dragnet and get to safety, but they had to move. 

The corridor was a dead end, but as Liara had suspected, there was a seam where several sections of prefabricated habitat material came together to a single point. She tapped the masonry with the butt of her pistol, finding a weak point then fired three rounds into the wall. When the dust cleared there was a hole big enough for them to pull themselves through. A krogan wouldn’t fit, but she and the turian would. She pushed him through first, then, pocketing the pistol, followed him. 

They reached the end of the next corridor, and descended again to street level. Here the crowds were still thronging, still full of people going about their business despite the commotion just two blocks over, and at present no patrolling krogan. Liara found a terminal and ordered up a cab. It would take a few minutes to arrive. In the meantime, she led the turian to a recessed doorway, where they could watch from cover.

“Will it wait for us?” he said. 

“We’ll see it come,” she said then asked, “What’s your name?” 

“Varian,” he said. 

“Liara.” She took his hand. Then, without letting go, pulled him closer and bent back his thumb. “What did Aria send you to do? Kill me?”

He cried out from the pain. She let up and he said, “We were just going to rob you. That’s all.”

“You came in heavily armed for a robbery.”

“We knew who you were.”

“Then you were unprepared.”

The turian thought about that for a moment. “Yes,” he said. 

Liara glanced at her watch, then at the street. “Then what was your mission?” 

“This morning, some human came up to us, handed us your picture and said, ‘Hey, rough up this asari. See if she’s got anything interesting in her pockets. Maybe we’ll let you run your own crew if you do this right.’” After a pause he said, “So we came to rough you up.”

“He came to you this morning?”

“Yeah,” Varian said, “Why is that important?”

Liara shook her head. “It’s not.”

“And you know that it was Aria that sent you.”

“Does anything happen here without her approval?”

“Not much,” Liara said. “I’ll give you that.” 

There was their car. Varian started for it, but Liara stopped him. Someone else approached the cab and a second later machinegun fire ripped through both the car and several people standing nearby. 

“I thought so,” she said. “Come on, quick. Around the back.”

They circled the block, maneuvering behind the troops—a mixed group of six human and krogan mercenaries—that had just shot up the cab. They’d arrived in a small craft with exterior seats that afforded quick dismount for a squad of soldiers, with a sealable compartment for a pilot and passenger. The troops were moving up the street and fanning out. A pair of them inspected the wreck and dead bodies. One of the people they’d shot was still moving, and they were shouting for them to stay the fuck down. Meanwhile the pilot had opened the hatches so he and his copilot could have a smoke. One turian and one human. Neither was wearing any kind of armor. 

“Perfect,” Liara said. “Go talk to them.”

“What?”

“You want to get out of here?” Liara said.

Varain thought, then said, “What am I supposed to say?”

“Just get them talking. I’ll handle the rest. Come at them from the copilot’s side, all right?”

Varian nodded. He got up to go, but Liara held him back. She said, “Do anything to alert them or the troops up ahead, and I’ll kill you, too.”

Liara waited as Varian hobbled down the street and then across the square to the small craft. She didn’t like leaving her survival up to this young turian. After all, he’d already botched one operation today. She crept down the street, using a low wall as cover, then slipped around the other side of the vehicle, coming in close behind its engine compartment and fuel cells, within hearing of the pilot and copilot, who were talking to Varian. 

“I lost track of her,” Varian was saying. One of pilots asked what he meant. “I was part of the team sent in to take her out.”

“Some job you did,” the pilot said. He was the turian, and there was an undertone in his voice that suggested Varian should be ashamed of himself for his failure to complete his mission. “We’re in this shit, because of you,” he said. 

“At least we’re getting paid extra, Talus.” This was the copilot. There was another round of shooting at the far end of the street. Liara saw her moment. She grabbed the pilot by the collar and tried to pull him out, but he was still buckled into his seat, so he only came partway before he began to struggle against her. 

She struck him twice with the pistol and he stopped fighting. The copilot reached for his sidearm but Liara was already pointing the pistol at him. “Out, or I kill you both.” When he didn’t move fast enough, she shot the pilot in the leg. Then she unbuckled the turian and threw him onto the ground. The human copilot jumped to the ground on his own, and Varian got in, as the craft was rising from the street.

Liara spun the vehicle in the opposite direction, but only rose a few meters off the ground, going as fast as she dared. The streets came to a bottleneck, where a crowd of close to a thousand people had gathered, their faces lit by the flames rising from the burning building. A group of humans with assault rifles and shotguns were trying to hold them back from the area. There was a loud rumble behind them, and an impenetrable cloud of dust filled the street. Liara rotated the craft upward. The building had collapsed. 

Their ship cleared the dust cloud, and there was the dark shape of a gunship, prowling down below them, following one of the streets by the warehouses. Its gunports lit up, shooting at something on the ground far beneath them. From somewhere small arms fire struck their ship, but didn’t cause any vital damage.

Two kilometers ahead was the transit hub, where they ditched the little ship, and instead climbed into a cab that Liara hacked to fly them off the station. As they flew off station, Liara contacted Alera, who unmoored the ship, and caught up to them at the edge of the asteroid field, opening the cargo bay, and then jettisoning the vehicle once Liara and Varian were safely aboard. 

On deck, Liara went to her cabin to get cleaned up and put on fresh clothing. Before she did, she had her crew take Varian down to the med bay, where they tended to his injuries. An hour later, she found Letha and Karen standing outside the med bay, watching Varian, who lay sedated and sleeping on the lower bunk. 

“Sweep him for tracking devices. Disable any you find in his clothing. If you find implants, leave them alone. Meanwhile, find out what you can about him. Record keeping on Omega is spotty, but you might turn up something interesting.”

“Understood,” Letha said. 

Liara went up to the flight deck to sit with Alera, and monitor the sensors.

“We got lucky today,” Alera said. “Not many people escape from a dragnet like that.”

“I don’t think it was luck,” Liara said. “The turian we’ve got below decks was engaged this morning to assault or perhaps even kill me.”

“We were still on the other side of the Omega-2 relay this morning,” Alera said. The ship had cleared the asteroid field and they were beginning to accelerate to FTL on a vector toward the Fathar system.

“Exactly. I think Aria was expecting him to fail.”

“What does she gain by having you killed?”

“That’s precisely what confuses me,” Liara said. “It could be she changed her mind and only gave the kill order later.” The ship was running at top speed now, inside its own bubble of darknesss as it outstripped the light of the surrounding stars. Then she had an idea. Liara got up and stepped into the comms cabin. 

“When we get to Lorek, let’s send Aria a message,” she said to Drummond. 

“Certainly,” Drummond said. “What should it say?”

“Better luck next time.”


	11. Sea Burian

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The crew of the Nixia deal with the captain's death.

Sea Burial

They found the captain on the science deck. Ten different crewmembers had seen it happen from different angles: the ship was under full acceleration, roughly three times the force of gravity on Thessia. There had been a noise in the companionway, and then the captain had come flying—falling—through the hatch above, striking the floor five meters below. Head first. The impact had snapped her neck, had, in fact, nearly decapitated her. Blood leaked in a slow jet through a ragged wound that ran from her collarbone up to her throat, as the captain’s body spun slowly through the air, bent into an impossible shape, in the weightless environment. 

There was no room for weakness, Essa knew, and so she set her jaw, while Neela, floating beside her collapsed into a fit of sobs along with half a dozen other crewmembers. 

Razia was seated nearby, her hands clasped together as though she’d already been shackled, her head down. Essa saw her mouth work, as though she were trying to prevent herself from having a normal reaction. She found it hard to imagine Razia was being genuine. 

Weakness, Essa thought, and reaching down, grabbed Razia by the collar of her tunic and pulled her upward, slamming her against the ceiling and striking her with the heel of her hand. She was shouting, beside herself, “You did this! You did this!” until someone pulled her away. 

It was Neela and another from the science team. 

“Essa,” she said. “No. No, there’s no way she could have. She wasn’t even on this deck when it happened.”

Razia, for her part, said nothing, not even bothering to rub the welt that was forming under her eye. Essa bared her teeth, wanting blood. This was her fault. 

Finally Razia said, “Get a hold of yourself, lieutenant. You’re in command now.”

Essa felt like she’d swallowed a stone. To have someone recognize her new position made it real. The dream of one day having her own ship to command, well, now here it was, the Nixia was all hers, unbidden, and unwanted. Razia opened her hands, a welcoming gesture, and reached for Essa, taking her in an embrace that she didn’t want to feel reassuring, but nonetheless did.

“I’m sorry about your captain,” Razia said. “She was good at what she did. This—” here Razia gestured toward the compartment “—this was not it should have ended.” The thread of blood was beginning to coalesce into purple blobs that drifted slowly across the compartment. Razia pulled Essa’s ear up to her mouth and said, “You need to get this cleaned up, and quickly.”

Essa nodded. She took a breath, and then began giving orders. Two crewmembers took hold of the captain, and another wrapped a cloth around her neck. Neela disappeared into the med bay and returned with something in her hand, that when unrolled turned out to be a body bag.

Essa watched her and the crewmembers slide the body in and zip the bag shut. The four of them went aft, where they put the captain’s body into one of the exterior storage pods. 

Essa had made it all the way back to the flight deck, before she realized that the front of her uniform was speckled with blood. She picked up the intercom and began to speak. 

“All hands, all hands. This is acting captain Essa D’Erinia speaking. Approximately fifteen minutes ago, during our systems malfunction, there was an accident.” She paused and her breath caught. She told herself, no hesitation, and went on. “It is my unfortunate duty to report to you that Captain Tenneya was killed. We will be holding a burial service for her on the crew deck before evening mess.”

#

It would have been a luxury to pause and mourn Tenneya. Essa had always respected her, and her decisions, though her behavior since the discovery of the installation had been—erratic, as though she were trying to complete two missions, while believing in neither. Clearly she’d known about the installation beforehand, but that was about all. The exact objectives of Razia and her team must have been as much a mystery to her as they remained for Essa. 

She tried to put that in the back of her mind as she went below, to check on the damage. The section heads were waiting for her, as was Razia, who now had a black eye to match her coil burn. She seemed to smile as Essa took her place at the head of the group. 

“Situation?” she said. 

One by one everyone spoke. A vent pipe had burst in engineering, but they had been able to replace it already. A drawer hadn’t been properly closed, causing minor damage in the med bay. There had been a few minor injuries, a few other small problems. 

The only crewmember that had any concerns was the navigator, who said she hadn’t been able to determine their position. The installation was behind them now, she said, though it appeared to have reoriented itself. Meanwhile the usual stars used for reference were not where they were supposed to be. She was, she said, running a scan, using the large telescope in the astronomy lab. High Rock had not answered the distress call yet. The second mate, she said, was looking into the possibility that there was interference blocking the signal. 

The meeting ended. Essa pushed off to the captain’s semi-private sleep area, hidden in an alcove behind the galley. There was her footlocker, mounted to the wall, packed expertly, everything in its place, as though she’d stowed her gear, but never used any of it. There were the rolled uniforms, the one-piece undergarments, the very few personal effects: a photograph of a little girl, the captain’s daughter, Essa knew, who was already grown and off at university; there was a well-thumbed book of Athame’s teachings, a pouch containing a set of game pieces and a rolled up game board that Essa had never seen before, and a data pad that was for the captain’s secure ship logs. She put all of these items, save book and the captain’s log, in a bag to be returned to her family on their arrival at Thessia. She was turning to leave when Razia appeared in the opening that led to the alcove. 

She hovered there, blocking the way out. Her expression betrayed, for once, some kind of humility. “I need to speak with you,” she said. 

Essa put up a hand. “Save it,” she said. “I have to attend to Captain Tennya’s funeral.”

“It can wait,” Razia said. “Right now, I need you to come with me.”

“Is that an order?”

“No,” Razia said. “Just—just follow me below deck.”

Essa did. They went below to the astronomy lab, where the telescope was still running through its search grid, looking for familiar star clusters. Razia gestured at the screen, and said, “In another hour, your navigator is going to tell you that she cannot find our position within the Parnitha system.” 

Essa stared at Razia, and said, “How do you come by this information?”

“We are no longer at Parnitha,” she said. Essa blinked, but didn’t respond. A moment later one of the scientists Razia had brought aboard came into the lab, holding something in her hand. It was a small device, a little piece of metal with indentations scattered here and there. Razia took the object and held it up. After the scientist had gone, she said, “We found this in the control room of the installation from which we have just departed. Actually, we took two, just in case.”

Neela instinctively reached for the object, and Razia let her take it. “What is it?” Neela said. 

“It allows us to interact with the installation,” Razia said. “It sends a signal out, we get one back, we send another. Then—” she gestured, spreading her hands “—whoosh, sparks fly, don’t they?”

Essa stared over at Neela, who was already attempting to open the device, though she couldn’t find a seam. 

“Interact,” Essa said. “Interacting had something to do with what happened when all our systems shut down. We could have lost the ship.”

“We didn’t,” Razia said, “We weren’t in danger of that. Even though you wouldn’t stop interfering with my mission, somehow we managed to survive.”

“Temporarily,” Neela said, her voice gloomy. “We’re not home yet.” Essa saw that behind her spectacles her eyes were swollen and her face streaked with dried tears. She held her hands clasped in a tight knot.

“Whether we are, as you say, no longer at Parnitha or not, we are in a difficult situation.” They were still at the very edge of the system. When the navigator finally did get a fix on their position they would have to burn hard to reach High Rock before it began its long swing around the other side of Parnitha. Or they would have to decide to run for Thessia, or one of the orbital stations near Janiri or Athame, though there would be no way to dock, and little in the way of medical facilities or even food or fuel. No matter what they did, their rations would soon be depleted, and they’d been wantonly burning their fuel, shuttling here and there, accelerating, maneuvering. And now this revelation that they had somehow left the system, that Parnitha was somewhere out there, far away. Essa didn’t believe it. 

The navigator would find out where they were. They would plot a course for—Essa’s stomach seized, and for a moment she thought she would vomit. She alone was responsible for the thirty-six—no, thirty-five—souls aboard the ship. They would live or die by her orders. 

Such information was hard to bear, and she’d been prepared for it during training, in simulated drills. She’d done a good many things in simulation, and in training exercises. It was only now that she realized that they prepared her for nothing at all. 

“If what you say is true,” Essa began, “we could turn around and go back.”

“It’s not that simple. We don’t know how to select a destination.”

So we could be out here for years, Essa thought, or forever. She shook her head, unable to speak for a moment. “There had to be a plan,” she said. “To get us back.”

“This is part of the reason you were selected,” Razia said. “You were deemed to be determined.”

“That doesn’t solve everything,” Essa said. 

“I agree. But I staked my life on your ability, and I’m very careful with the risks I take. You don’t live long in special operations if you don’t.” Razia was quiet for a moment, then went on, “And if we don’t return, our disappearance will be considered an acceptable sacrifice. We’ve proven the concept. The installations work as we thought they did.” 

“I would ask how you knew what the installation was for,” Essa said, “if I had any hope of you providing a full answer.” Neela handed the object back to Razia and moved up to the ceiling of the compartment where she lay flat on her back, on the cushions. 

Razia seemed chastened now. She said, “I don’t have all the details. The people who give my orders are very circumspect.” Then, rubbing her neck as though it were still sore from her earlier fight with Essa, began, “Two years ago, I was approached by one of the divisional commanders of the Serrice Intelligence Council. She told me that she needed me to assemble a team of ten operatives, all with zero gravity combat experience, all of them unbonded and childless, and all fiercely loyal.”

“Looks like you found them,” Neela said. 

Razia nodded. “That part was, relatively speaking, easy. A few months later, once we’d we’d been training together for some time, the higher up comes to me again, and shows me an image of the installation. She tells me how she got it, and what she needed me to do. Go aboard, find one of those objects and bring it back to the ship. How does she know about the object you’re holding? I don’t know. It wasn’t my job to ask, was it? Meanwhile—well, you’ve seen what we did to your cargo hold.”

“I have half a mind to vent it and you along with it out into space,” Essa said. 

“That wouldn’t be smart, captain,” Razia said. “We’re the only ones who know how the damned thing works.” 

“You could tell me,” Essa said.

“That wouldn’t be very smart, now would it, captain?”

“I could force you.”

Razia’s gaze held, but only just. She said, “Go ahead. I have fulfilled my mission objectives. From here on in, I’m just a passenger. I humbly submit to your command.”

Essa and Neela exchanged a look. She said, “There are no passengers on a ship like this, just able hands or useless mouths. You and your team, get to work. First one that shirks or that disobeys any command I offer is the first out the airlock. Understood?”

“Perfectly.”

“Then here is my first order. You hand over your weapons. Rifles, sidearms, knives, ammunition. All of it. Gather it up and bring it to the crew deck. You’ve got five minutes.”

Razia hovered there. 

“Clock’s ticking, commandant.”

“You didn’t say I was dismissed, captain.”

Essa glared, wanting to grab Razia by the collar and throw her through the door out into the main lab compartment. Instead she only gave in to the challenge and told the commandant that she could go.

# 

An hour later, Essa was floating in the center of the common area of the crew deck in front of the assembled crew. This was not her first sea burial. It was not uncommon for a crewmate to die on long voyages, radiation poisoning and accidental decompression for the most part, illness, accidents, and the occasional suicide accounted for the rest. No matter what the circumstances the ceremony was always the same. Everyone from the ship gathered to say something about the deceased. That done, the captain read from the Athame Codex, a passage called “The Stone and the Pond,” and then led the crew to the fore airlock, where the captain’s body was left floating in the center of the compartment. Essa said, “We know this place.” She armed the outer hatch, and then cycled the airlock, and finished the formulation, “For anywhere we bury our dead must be our home.” The crew gave the appropriate response, and the ceremony ended. Essa watched on the monitor as the captain’s body, sealed in its bag charted its own trajectory away from the ship. Beside it, were three other objects, crates containing the commandos’ weapons and ammunition, that Essa herself had boxed and left in the airlock to set adrift. No one seemed to notice the weapons being jettisoned 

Everyone went below again, to the crew deck, where the steward had prepared the evening meal. Everyone ate, but no one spoke, and soon enough, the crew had retreated to their stations, to continue their duties. 

#

On the flight deck there was no good news. The navigator had worked out their position relative to the parent star—she made a point of saying star, instead of Parnitha—and the five visible planets in its orbit. Two gas giants, one with a massive ring system, a frozen outer rocky and ice world with little atmosphere, and finally two terrestrial planets each somewhat smaller than Thessia. One of these was in close to the star, its surface scorched and irradiated from the incessant glow, but this last one appeared, in the telescope image to have water, clouds, continents. 

“So where are we?” Essa asked. 

The navigator moved some information over to her screen. “The short answer,” she said, “is that we have no idea.” The navigator took a breath and said, “None of the star clusters match our detailed charts. It doesn’t appear we are anywhere within or even near the Athena Nebula.” She then directed Essa’s attention to the parent star, a yellow dwarf with a spectral range similar to Parnitha’s but different enough to show that the two were not identical. “The worst thing is,” the navigator went on, “is that the galactic core is not where it’s supposed to be. Instead it’s here.” She indicated a spot on her observational chart, and said, “If I had to give an estimate of our position, I would say that we’re here, relative to Thessia.”

Essa pinched the bridge of her nose. “You’re certain?” she said. 

“Yes, captain. We’re at least a thousand light-years from home.”  
#

When the watch ended, Essa went below to try and catch a few hours of sleep, but found herself reading from the book of proverbs, excerpted from the Armali Codex. The book had been the captain’s and to Essa, who wasn’t especially inclined toward religion, it seemed odd that both she and the captain would have admired the story of the twelfth huntress, which the captain had marked with a line of red ink, running down the side of the page. 

She read:  
Long ago, when Athame still walked amongst her subjects, and spoke in her own voice, not through visions or augury, she commanded to the twelve tribes and asked that each send a huntress, their best, their bravest to sport for Athame’s pleasure. 

This the twelve tribes did as commanded.

But there was jealousy. Why has, asked those not chosen, this maiden been favored over me? They cried out to Athame, to punish their mothers’ and sisters’ choice and reconsider their tribute. 

Athame, hearing this, told each warrior, “Return to your people. Their jealousy brings shame upon you all.”

All accepted, but for one, who demanded the goddess accept her tribute. Athame became enraged and struck at the huntress, who parried the blow. For three days a battle raged between the two, such that at night their blows showered the darkness with blue sparks. 

At the end of the third day, Athame lowered her weapon and said, “I cannot best you.” The huntress lowered her weapon and agreed. 

They bound each other’s wounds, and on that fourth night, lay together as bondmates. And it came to pass that the huntress, Nidera, became mother to a daughter she named Halenna. 

A dozen years passed. Halenna had grown into herself, standing almost as tall as her mother, and skilled in the hunt and the ways of the trackless forest. It was time for her to become a maiden. 

On the eve of the celebration of her maidenhood, Athame returned in her fiery chariot that burned the sky, and set fire to the land in a violent show of anger. 

The people gathered around her, and came forth from her chariot and said, “You have my daughter, and I have yours.” From behind Athame stepped one like Halenna. A girl of twelve, she was beautiful and strong like her sister. 

Athame took Nidera to the garden, and to her, she said, “It is time to say farewell to our daughter, for I shall take her with me. You shall not see her again.” 

Nidera wept but knew she must agree. 

“It is also time for me to weep,” said Athame, “For I must leave my daughter, Lothe, with you. She is to be yours.”

“What will become of Halenna?”

Athame did not answer, but merely held out her arms and behind her, her sword made fire race through the heavens. 

Nidera parted from Halenna with much weeping. 

Athame kept her word. Nidera never saw her daughter again, but instead took to raising Athame’s daughter, Lothe. 

Lothe was clever and full of mischief. When Janiri showed the people how to build pens for the animals, Lothe pulled the fences sown and set the creatures free. She spent her time at the edge of the forest and made garlands of flowers, instead of hunting or scattering the seeds her aunt Janiri brought with her. 

A lifetime passed, and the stars wheeled overhead, and Athame in her house, looked down from above, with her double-light. 

By and by Nidera passed on. They laid her upon a bonfire, and the flames had reached the sky Athame’s chariot came racing through the air.

Now she stepped forth with Halenna, who had become a matron. She held a baby in her arms, one she had conceived with Athame, the father. 

Halenna paid her respects to her mother, whose flames lasted all night, and in the morning she told the people of the wonders she had seen. Athame, she said, skipped from one place to another in the black oceans of the night, and showed her the other, unseen worlds that lived in the stars painted in the night sky. 

Essa put the book away, and turned out the reading light. She would need to be ready for duty in another five hours, would need to be able to pretend that she was never unrested, always ready and never, ever fazed by anything. She was just on the edge of sleep again, when she felt Neela’s warm body slip into the bag alongside her. In an instant, Neela’s hands were inside Essa’s jumpsuit, caressing every part of her. It had been years, it seemed, since anyone had simply touched her, she thought. Essa let out a gasp as their bodies wrapped around each other. But Neela put a hand over her mouth and whispered, “We have to be quiet. No one on the crew can know.”


	12. Ghosts and Ashes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Liara and Varian visit Daybreak, part of the old Esan colony, looking for more clues left behind by her mother.

When she woke from the first decent rest she’d had in over a week, Liara went below decks to look in on Varian, their turian acquisition, before they made planetfall at Lorek. She found Letha watching over him through the window. She was unarmed, but the door to the bay was locked. It seemed unlikely he was capable of breaking through, and should he decide to escape, Letha was more than capable, even barehanded. Varian was sitting on the edge of the bunk, stroking his crest. The markings on his face suggested he—or more likely his distant family—was originally from Taetrus. They had applied a brace to his ankle, and welded the broken mandible before wrapping it. 

“Did you find anything on him?”

“Not much. An identity card, from his secondary school on Omega, for what that’s worth. They’re easily forged.”

“How old is he?” Liara said. 

“Nineteen. By rights he should be at his second military posting by now.”

“He’s an Omegan. They’re not typically compelled to serve. If he’s Omegan.” 

“We found tracking devices in his tunic, boots and the handle of his weapon. And another tracer implanted near his spine. By the look of where it was inserted, I’d say it had been put in less than a week ago. We could probably still get it out without much trouble.”

“No, let’s leave it where it is. I want to know why Aria thinks this boy is so valuable.”

Letha nodded. “He’s been complaining about wanting his clothing back all morning,” she said. Varian looked up and saw Liara. Instinctively he shrunk back into his bunk. 

Liara opened the door to the med bay. To Letha she said, “Lock us in,” and, mostly for Varian’s benefit, she added loud enough for Varian to hear, “Kill him if he tries anything.”

Varian pretended not to have heard what she’d said, and instead picked at the bandage on his mandible. 

“You’re awake,” Liara said. 

“I don’t suppose you have anything to eat on this ship.”

“I make a point of carrying dextro rations,” Liara said. She sat down on the bunk beside him. “They’re nothing special, but at least they won’t make you ill. How are you feeling?”

“I’ll live.”

“That’s entirely up to you,” Liara said, squaring her shoulders. “You’ve got a tracking device embedded in your flesh. I’m wondering if you know why.” 

Varian shook his head and ran his palm over his crest. His tough skin was greenish-gray, and in the outsized hospital gown, he looked even thinner than he actually was. “Until yesterday, I was running with one of Aria’s low-level crews.”

“The hornets have taken over low level operations,” Liara said, letting him know the lie wouldn’t work. There were no rival groups of mercenaries on Omega any more. Aria had them doing everything from taking out rivals to running her collection network. “Either you were out of uniform, or you’re lying.”

Varian shrugged again. He seemed to know he was caught, but didn’t say anything.

“I thought it was curious that we were allowed to escape.”

“We,” Varian said with a joyless chuckle. “Does that mean we’re working together now?”

“Hardly. But somehow we both got off Omega with only a few bumps and scratches. You don’t think that’s odd?” 

“You’re saying Aria thought you were going to bring me along on this adventure?”

“No, but she might have thought I’d take you hostage,” Liara said. “Though I do have a habit of picking up strays.”

“What you’re suggesting is ridiculous.”

“Well,” Liara said. “Are you fit to walk?”

“Yes. Why?” 

Liara got up. “Be ready to move in half an hour,” she said. “My crew will find you some suitable clothing, and get yourself something to eat. We’re landing shortly.” 

“Landing? Where?”

Liara didn’t answer, but only gestured for Letha to let her out. 

#

Lorek was a tidally locked planet. One hemisphere permanently faced the parent star; the other was in permanent night. The dayside of the planet was a vast, and largely unexplored desert. The night side was buried under an ice sheet that, at its thickest concentration, was thirty kilometers deep. Most of the planet’s water was bound up there.   
At the terminator, there was a narrow band of habitable land, less than hundred kilometers wide, where imported flora had at one time flourished. Most of it had been burned away during the invasion, though there were signs some of it was coming back. At the dark edge of the terminator, vast networks of glaciers cut valleys, digging deep into the planet’s crust, and creating faults that led to frequent earthquakes. The glaciers, too, and were constantly calving into the planet’s shallow seas. Toward the sunside, the oceans were perpetually evaporating away, creating a planet-wide range of mountains made almost entirely out of mineral salts. The collision of hot, moist air from over the ocean and cool air at the terminator made for frequent foul weather, raging storms, and violent downdrafts that sometimes knocked ships out of the sky. 

When the asari had first arrived, they had founded two colonies on opposite sides of the terminator that thrived in the perpetual twilight, naming them Daybreak and Nightfall. Both had remained inhabited, even though the batarians after annexing the colony had—perhaps in order to more easily subdue the population—moved and rebuilt much of the important infrastructure in a series of cities closer to the planet’s equator. 

Then the reapers had come and gone, leaving nothing alive. The only sign of recent visitors was a prewar freighter of batarian design, wheeling end over end, and leaking radiation from its drive core. 

Liara said to Alera, “What do you think? Post invasion?”

Alera scanned the ship. “It might be,” she said. “Maroll’s Rest. Looks like it belonged to the Dolek Shipping Coalition. No distress beacon, and it hasn’t been logged as lost or missing. Doesn’t look like it was scuttled, though.”

Liara wasn’t as sure. She said, “Keep your eye on the scanners. We don’t want any surprises.” 

Looking down from orbit, it was clear that the reapers had bombarded the batarian population centers from space, cities that had once numbered in the hundreds of thousands, leaving little more behind than square grids or circular patterns of blast craters. Each impact had a characteristically ten or twelve-pointed star shape, caused by the bolt of molten metal striking the ground. 

Elsewhere they saw reaper landing sites, where the paths of destruction were more chaotic. Alera guided the ship around the dayside of the planet, where their approach would be harder to track, and descended to five thousand meters, dropping even lower as they approached the Daybreak colony. Even with the blast shields up, Liara could feel the heat from the star burning its way through. 

Alera found an open area large enough to land the ship: a plaza surrounded on all sides by low buildings that would screen their exact position from anyone observing from the ground. Liara met Varian at the ramp as it was coming down. 

“Ready?” she said, as she checked her shotgun and clipped it to its bracket on her back. 

“I don’t know what for,” Varian said.

“Neither do I. Now let’s move.” Liara pushed him ahead of her, and the two went down the ramp. Liara took hold of Varian’s shoulder and led him at a jog to the edge of the square where she bent low and shielded her face. A moment later the ship’s engines throttled up from their low idle, and with a blast of rubble and ash the craft rose back into the air. It was starting to rain.

Varian looked after it, his mandibles flicking. 

“Come on,” Liara said, and started working her way east, without waiting to see if he was following.

The plaza where they had landed was in ruins. Nothing but the bad weather had disturbed the rubble there for a long time. The tall buildings that filled the neighborhood to the west had all burned, their windows nothing more than black holes in the walls. They all looked as though they might come down at any minute. 

The city itself was laid out following a series of circular roads that were crisscrossed by diagonal avenues, and a grid of smaller streets that ran either north south or east west. At major intersections, the wind that howled through the gaping holes in the rubble, and over the cornices of the buildings, filling the air with grit and dust and blowing pellets of freezing rain. 

A destroyer-sized reaper had landed here during the invasion. Its footprints were everywhere, and long trenches three or four meters deep, dug by its beam. Along their way, Liara and Varian passed a number of crashed reaper troop carriers, their cargoes of husks and cannibals—the flesh long since rotted away, their mechanical parts still intact—scattered over the rooftops. The people of Daybreak had put up a determined fight, little good it had done them. There were no signs of anyone having survived. 

When she’d finally gotten used to the noise of the wind blowing through the ruins, other sounds emerged. Unstable structures groaning, sheet metal bending in the wind, dust singing over the rough edges of the rubble. After another kilometer of destroyed city streets, her mind began to play tricks on her: she thought she heard footsteps and whispers. It was an uncanny feeling, but one she knew was an illusion, from all the time she’d spent alone on prothean digs.

“Do you hear that?” Varian said.

“Do I hear what?”

“Voices. They’re always just up ahead.”

“You haven’t been in many ruins, have you?” Liara said. “Ghosts, ashes. It’s all in your head.”

“I hope you’re right.” 

There was another sound of creaking metal and concrete, and the façade of a building on the next block collapsed into the street. 

Liara changed to a northerly route. “Let’s go around,” she said. “The old colony isn’t far.”

“Where are we going?”

“A place called the anthill. Maybe you’ve heard of it.” Varian only shook his head.

When the asari had first come to Esan, they had lived in prefabricated housing compartments, and for the next decade, before real construction began, they’d shipped in nearly ten thousand units for the colonists and their families. The arrangement of the habitats had begun in orderly fashion but soon the colonists began stacking the compartments in more haphazard fashion. To add stability to the structure, they had piled a mountain of gravel and dirt on top of the shelters, creating a conical, blunt-topped hill at the eastern edge of Daybreak. To make every part of the space accessible, the residents had cut holes in their walls to fashion a warren of communicating living spaces that had later become known as the anthill. In time vegetation had grown over it, leaving it partially hidden from view, and well protected from the elements. It had once been the center of all colonial activity, but later, as the colony grew more prosperous, and particularly during the batarian occupation, it had become a kind of alienage, where the poorest asari lived in squalor. 

That notwithstanding, the anthill was the oldest standing part of the colony, and the only part that had been in existence when her mother had come to the colony in 1522, by the current calendar. 

The anthill would have been the ideal place to make a last stand against the reapers, and so Liara feared it would have likely been destroyed outright. Instead, she found it relatively intact. She pointed it out to Varian, when she caught sight of its flat peak, rising over jagged rubble that had once been the walls of a busy commercial district. The vegetation had burned, and what little had regrown was scrub and weeds. The reapers had appeared to concentrate their bombardment on the neighborhood to the east, leaving a series of overlapping craters that Liara and Varian would have to cross in order to reach the anthill itself. 

Liara signaled for Varian to stop about three blocks before their reached the craters. Something didn’t seem right to her. 

“This is the most direct way,” she said. “But we’ll need to go around.”

Varian nodded. They turned into an alley, and forced open the back door to a shop. There was a hole in the roof that let the rain come pouring in. The front of the building had been clothing shop, its floor covered with asari and batarian mannequins. Varian jumped. 

“I thought you would be tougher than that,” Liara said. 

“I saw you flinch, too.”

Liara smiled, and used the flashlight at the end of her shotgun to search the area. The front of the building had burst inward from the blast of a reaper beam that had struck a few blocks away. The floor was covered with fist-sized ingots of metal. Varian picked one up and turned it over in his hands. It was jagged, like a handful of broken glass. 

He tossed aside and it shattered against the concrete floor. 

“Quiet,” Liara said. “I heard something.”

“I thought that was just your mind playing tricks on you,” Varian said. Liara put out her flashlight and took cover behind the wall by the door. 

“Down!” she said. “Now!” Varian pressed himself against the wall on the other side of the doorway. 

A wheeled vehicle was parked out in the street. It was new, and relatively clean, and its engine was running. Beside it stood two geth platforms holding digging tools. A young male quarian was sitting in the cockpit of the crawler, with the hatch open. In one of the passenger seats was a female, who looked to be asleep.

Varian mouthed the word, friendlies to Liara. She shook her head. Not in a place like this. Unannounced visitors would more likely be met with gunfire than friendly handshakes and an offer to share dextro rations. She reached into a pouch on her belt and pulled out two biotic grenades. They would make a lot of noise, but more than likely wouldn’t damage the crawler, at least not more than to scratch the paint, and release enough electromagnetic energy to confuse the geth for a few minutes. But that wasn’t the point. Those minutes in particular could mean the difference between life and death, and if she were lucky, she wouldn’t have to detonate them at all. 

Liara placed one grenade inside the doorway, and the other under a pile of rubble by the caved-in window, and rigged a trigger on her onmitool. The geth moved to the other side of the street and began shoveling debris into the back of the crawler. The quarian driver got out and began relieving himself against the side of the building. He was close enough that Liara could make out the implants embedded behind his ear, where, she knew, a collective of geth symbiotes lived within him, sharing his thoughts and whispering to him. 

Knowing the geth as she had once known them, Liara found this symbiosis troubling, even though the quarians and were both prospering by it. Of course, there were other geth, who had decided to found cloistered communities, on Rannoch, and elsewhere. Who knew what they were planning. 

When the quarian turned to go back to the crawler, she signaled to Varian, and they slipped away, through the back of the building and into the next street, where they saw more signs of activity, but no bodies moving, though through the rain it was hard to tell if anyone was watching. 

“It’s a wonder they didn’t spot us,” Varian said. 

“We weren’t tracking any ships ourselves,” Liara said. “It’s almost as if they were marooned here.”

“Do the quarians still do that?”

“It’s rare,” Liara said. “I’ve heard their merchant fleet frowns on the practice and it’s no longer accepted punishment in their navy, though I gather that doesn’t stop individual captains from doing it from time to time.” She paused to wipe the rain out of her face. “They’re a bit well equipped to have been left behind, they might be looking to reestablish the colony.” 

They reached the anthill without further incident and went inside. The ground floor interior had burned, though the fire hadn’t spread all the way through the structure. Still, the building had no power, and there was almost no light. Liara broke open a luminol cube and gave it to Varian, who tried to pretend its blue glow wasn’t a comfort. 

“What are we looking for, anyhow?”

“A dead drop,” Liara said. “An old one.”

Over the centuries, the old living compartments had begun to deteriorate, and had, as the residents grew poorer and poorer, the structure had been shored up with increasingly makeshift materials. Scrap metal grafted over scrap metal. Old pipes had been sawed off, and new pipes put down alongside. Vermin crawled in through every unplugged hole, and near the end of its usefulness, the hill had become known as a breeding ground for all manner of pulmonary ailments, most of them not easily treated with available medicine. 

And then the invasion had come. Most of the residences had been stripped of anything valuable, and most of the furniture that was too bulky to carry had simply been dragged into the hallways, as though meant to impede onrushing enemy attackers. Here and there were holes made by small arms fire, though Liara gathered that sort of damage predated the reaper invasion. 

The dead drop Liara was looking for was on the third level, in an old lavatory that had since been renovated into a storage area for a kitchen. Asari intelligence kept detailed logs of where their agents concealed information for their handlers. This particular location was notable, because Benezia herself had flagged it as compromised in the logs 

Indoors, in the silence of the building, they heard sounds emerging from the howl of the wind, Liara again heard voices and footsteps, and, from time to time, saw a muddy print on the ground. Two toed quarian boots had been through, and recently. 

Water leaked through the ceiling panels, whether from corroded pipes, or from the downpour outside, Liara wasn’t sure. But the flow of water didn’t quite drown out the sound of talking. She put out her light for a moment, and there, off the corridor, in one of the common rooms, was a group of quarians, females for the most part, and two geth platforms, searching amid the debris on the floor of the mostly empty room. She motioned for Varian to hide his light under his tunic, and they slipped past the doorway.

“I wonder what they’re looking for,” Varian said, after they’d climbed several levels. 

“Furniture, I think,” Liara said. “I heard them say something about a dining room table. Here, it’s this way.”

A few steps more down the corridor and they found the old kitchen, old stoves bought as surplus for a few credits, and installed here, where one or two people had once cooked in withering heat, with inadequate equipment, meals for hundreds, who ate in the adjacent mess hall. Liara shone her light against the wall, moving from right to left, as though she were reading a page of text, until she saw the marker: 303. Behind a panel in the wall, she found what she was looking for: a dense black slab of material, no larger than her ring finger, that when pressed, opened out to reveal a small piece of tin with a bit of binary code etched into it with a laser.

Varian stared and said, “Well, that was worth the trip.”

“Believe it or not, turian,” Liara said, “It was.” She scanned the code with her omnitool then closed the box again, which when resealed, would release a chemical that would burn off the etching, erasing the code. 

Liara tossed the box aside, and as she did the building shook, and then shook again. 

She and Varian ran to the stairs, and taking them two at a time, reached the ground floor. From down the corridor came the sound of shouts and small arms fire. Coming toward them was a young quarian woman, who was clutching something against her abdomen. It took Liara a moment to realize that it was her entrails. 

More shooting at the far end of the corridor: a loud volley of automatic fire, followed by weaker counterfire, from the more lightly armed quarians. Through the noise someone was shouting, Blow the entrance! Blow it before they all come in!

There was a concussion that staggered the young quarian.

She fell toward them and collapsed at Varian’s feet. “Help me,” she murmured. Varian bent over her and tried to roll her over, but she groaned, and then cried out. The two of them helped her to her feet, and together they hobbled upward again, soon enough reaching the kitchen where they’d found the dead drop. Another explosion rocked the building, making the ceiling spit water and dust. Liara made the quarian lie down on a table in the dining hall. She tore her clothes open to begin dressing the wound, but it was soon clear there was nothing they could do for her. She’d been shot multiple times in the abdomen, squash-head rounds that had entered through her back and exploded out through her stomach.

Liara broke open a pack of medigel and began applying it. It didn’t seem likely it would stop the bleeding, or the sepsis that would follow. “What’s your name?” Liara said. 

“Asha-na—na—” the quarian said, but her voice was a gasp, and it wasn’t clear whether the last syllable wasn’t nar, indicating that she had not yet completed her pilgrimage, a tradition that had somehow survived liberation of their homeworld. Her face was spattered with blood, perhaps someone else’s, but she had pretty, almond shaped eyes, almost too big for her face, and black hair that fell in tight curls from underneath the protective work hood she wore. Liara placed a hand on her forehead. 

She said, “What are you doing here, child?”

The girl looked up at her, her expression blank. She groaned again as Liara and Varian worked on her. No medical attention would save this girl, Liara thought, but she needed to keep her alive long enough to get some information. If the medigel hurt a little as it went in, as long as she didn’t pass out from the pain—as long as it kept her awake—then, well, all right. 

“Shen,” Ashana said. “He thought there was some kind of ancient asari treasure buried here. We’ve been here—Ah!” she cried out again “—looking. Looking for three or four days, waiting for our ship. And digging here and there.”

There was more shooting down below, and the anthill shook. The attempt to close the entrance had failed. They didn’t have much time. 

“Who did this to you?” Liara said. But the girl was too far gone now. Her intelligent gaze was fixed on the ceiling, focused on something far away. She had been holding Liara’s hand, but now she let go.

She only said, “You have to leave. They’ll get you too.” She gasped again and shut her eyes against the pain. Liara injected her with a sedative, and without waiting, took a scalpel from her medkit and began to pry the implant out from behind the girl’s ear. The girl, realizing what was happening, reached up and grabbed Liara’s wrist. “No, don’t—” she whispered. “Don’t take them from me.”

“I’m sorry,” Liara said, and stopped. She wondered how many times she’d said that, to people she thought she couldn’t help, and had left alone to die. Too many for one conscience. There wasn’t time to worry about that now. 

Turning to Varian, she said, “We need to get out of here.”

“Wasn’t that the only exit?”

“We can get out through the uppermost level,” Liara said, not waiting for him. “We’ll be exposed, but if we hurry, the firefight may still be their primary concern.” She was already on her way out of the room, while the quarian girl behind her murmured again, Don’t. Don’t.

“We can’t just leave her.”

“You can carry her if you like,” Liara said. “She’ll only die faster if you do.”

“We could get her back to the ship,” he said. 

“We are several days away from the kind of care she needs.” Varian nodded. Omega wasn’t an option any more. 

Even so, he stopped where he was. Liara kept moving. Let him stay, if he wanted to play the role of hero. Yesterday he’d been a thug, today he was a savior. It wasn’t the first time she’d seen such a thing happen. She herself had done similar things. But today was no time for that. Liara aimed , above all, to survive. She was in the corridor now, nothing to stop her from going to level above, unless she encountered a gunman coming up from below.

She hadn’t gone more than twenty meters when she stopped and turned around. She found Varian picking up the quarian, gently as he could. He was whispering something to her, as he held her cradled in his arms. Her head drooped, as though she were already dead. Liara knew better. A body can endure a great deal, and sometimes it could take hours to bleed out, if not days. “All right,” she said to him. “Come with me. Try to keep up.”

#

The shooting ended down below. It had been a brief and brutal firefight. A few minutes later, there were several volleys of automatic weapons fire. Executions, Liara realized. By then they were near the top of the structure. 

There was a little light up here, as more of the habitat units were close enough to the surface to have windows. She found one that faced the city to see what was going on. Through the rain, she saw two dropships had landed at the far edge of the crater. Smoke rose from where she and Varian had spotted the crawler. The ships had markings she couldn’t quite read at this distance. Varian looked and said, “Specials. Guys who were too trigger happy for the hornets. You need to contact your ship. If it’s in orbit, they’ll shoot it down.”

Liara keyed her comm, but there was no answer from Alera. “They might be jamming us,” she said. 

Varian nodded, but didn’t seem convinced. 

At the top of the building, was a platform that had once been an overlook. The quarians has posted a lookout there, though a sniper had taken him out, likely before he could warn his comrades. He lay on his back, his right hand curled uselessly around the grip of his rifle. 

Liara paused to check on the girl. She was still breathing, but that was the only good news. Blood was leaking down her arm, leaving a trail on the ground, one that would have been easy for an attacker to follow. She called for Alera again, and again received no answer. 

To Varian she said, “Wait here,” and crawled over the lip of the overlook, where, crouching in the bushes, she found two humans in unmarked armor looking down over the western face of the anthill. She pressed the trigger she’d set earlier on her omnitool, detonating the two charges she’d planted earlier. There was a crack, and a puff of smoke and dust. 

While the two men spoke with someone over their radio, Liara came up close behind them, and shot them both in the head, and then again to make certain they were neutralized. 

She found a good place to hide, and waited. After five minutes, when no one had come to investigate, she went back and got Varian. As they picked their way down the eastern face of the anthill, marching farther and farther into the darkness near the terminator, she radioed again for Alera. This time there was a response.

“Sorry, doctor, we had to keep a low profile. Inbound now.”

“Good,” Liara said. “Have Letha and Drummond prepare the med bay. We have an emergency.”

“Roger that,” Alera said. “Five minutes. Find somewhere for me to land.”

When Liara had finished, Varian turned to her. He was breathing hard from the strain of carrying the quarian. “Thank you,” he said. “Again.”

“You’re running up quite a lot of debt with me,” she said. Then she shook her head, and looked at the quarian, whose face was still a tense grimace. “Just be ready,” she said. “She probably won’t live to see us break orbit.”

Varian nodded, but he was looking out at the horizon. “We still have to try,” he said.


	13. Adrift

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Essa deals with her new role as captain of the Nixia.

Adrift

Orie, the galley steward, hardly a day over sixty and just out of the academy, was singing to herself as she prepared the crew’s first watch meal when Essa woke. It was an old, old song, but that still rang true, as far as Essa was concerned. She sang:  
When I was a maiden, I put out to sea,  
My love waited by the shore,  
And when I came home,  
We built us a house,  
I don’t to go sea any more.  
She knew, Essa thought. She knew, and that meant that soon the whole crew would know. Neela was gone, as Essa had expected, though she hadn’t expected her bag to feel as cold and empty as it did. It was almost as though it hadn’t happened, Neela’s skin against hers, the two of them panting in the moments afterward, both of them as giddy as if all they had to worry about was being discovered by their mothers. Essa made sure her uniform was on straight before she slipped out of her bag, and pushed herself toward the companionway to the bridge. 

Orie called out to stop her. “Captain!” she said. By the time Essa had turned around, Orie was there behind her, two small pouches in hand. She was short, but so narrowly built, Essa imagined she could slip into the space between the interior and exterior bulkhead. Her skin was a darker shade of blue, almost purple, and she had yellowish markings over the bridge of her nose, and on her chin. She smiled her lopsided grin then seemed to remember suddenly that she was addressing the captain. “Captain,” she said again, sounding nervous. “I was going to wake you, but now that you’re up, I have your breakfast.” She smiled and gave Essa a brief salute before she returned to her work. Essa tucked the two pouches into a pocket designed specifically for that purpose, and entered the companionway to the flight deck. 

No good news. Broadcasting on all open channels had turned up no responses from anything in their vicinity. Navigational data suggested their momentum was carrying them toward the center of the system, though their path would intersect with one of the outer gas giants in a less than thirty-six hours, if they didn’t take action. A burn long enough to vector them out of danger would see at least a quarter of their current fuel stores depleted. 

Worse even was that the system reboot they’d experienced before the event—Essa could think of no other word for it—appeared to have altered their navigational software. The navigator sent the data to Essa’s screen. She thought the plotted path looked all right, but the numbers didn’t add up. The vectors and burn-times were wrong: the vectors were too long, the burn-times too short relative to the output of their engines. 

“What do you make of it?” Essa said. She looked at the navigator, who shook her head as she examined her own panel. 

“I don’t know,” she said. Essa looked across to the second mate, now the Nixia’s acting XO. “Your watch is supposed to be over,” she said, “but I will need to impose upon you for a little while longer.”

“Aye-aye, Captain.”

Essa rose from her seat. She’d scarcely had time to strap herself in. 

“Where are you going?” the navigator said.

“Captain,” Essa shot back. 

The navigator blinked, but nodded and said, “Captain.”

“That will be all for now. I will be in the cargo bay. Raise me on the comms if you need me.”

#

Through the companionway again. On the crew deck, the science team, the commandos, and the engineering crew had assembled for the morning meal. Orie darted here and there, and flashed Essa a smile and a salute. Almost everyone—save the commandos—rose to a standing position to do the same before returning to their conversations. Neela was sitting with her team, her back turned. Essa paused a moment to see if she would come over to say hello, but Neela was discussing something on a datapad that hovered in in the air in the midst of her team. 

Down through engineering and the aft observation and storage. Down into the cargo bay, where Razia was seated with the two technicians. No one was talking, but instead studying screens they had deployed on the console in front of them. Essa approached close enough to see they were showing the same data the navigator was studying on her console, far above on the flight deck. 

“I hope I’m not interrupting,” Essa said. 

Razia looked up and shook her head. The two technicians turned around, but said nothing, and soon returned to work. 

“You’re studying our problem, I see,” Essa said. 

“You could say that,” Razia said. She slapped her palms to her knees and let her body drift upward from her seat. “Care to join us?”

“I even brought breakfast,” Essa said. She got out her pouches and showed them to Razia, who again shook her head.

“We’re fine, Captain.”

Essa took Razia’s seat. She sipped from the pouches, while she watched the technicians work. They were, it seemed, trying to determine which were the corrupted lines of code. 

“So you know our navigation software has been rewritten.”

“We are aware,” Razia said. 

One of the techs turned around in her seat. “We were actually wondering when you were going to come down to see us.”

Essa glared, but said nothing. 

The tech smiled. “I have something to show you,” she said. 

She pushed away from her console and moved over to a little rig that rested on a workbench. It didn’t look like much: two copper coils, spaced just so, a small power source, a few instruments attached. 

“I’ve seen an electromagnet before,” Essa said with a sigh. 

“Not like this,” the tech said. She pulled a piece of the mineral from her pocket: it had been pressed and shaped into a sphere the size of a large marble, and in the light appeared to shimmer light blue and white. She carefully placed the marble between the two coils before switching on the power. Nothing remarkable happened. 

“I don’t see how this is going to fix our navigation software,” Essa said. “Or solve our fuel situation.” 

The tech only smiled. “Everything,” she said, “every piece of matter in existence, has mass. It makes things hard to move around. Even in space.”

Essa only shrugged. That much was obvious. 

“What if you could shed all your mass? Or increase it substantially?”

“What are you suggesting?” Essa said.

“This mineral,” the tech said. “It’s everywhere on Thessia. It’s all over High Rock. It’s in our bones, and our bloodstreams. It’s odd how little we understand it.” She took out another piece of the mineral from her pocket, a small bead of metal no larger than the head of a pin that she placed near the larger sphere. After a moment, the bead began to orbit the larger marble. Essa still wasn’t impressed. The tech adjusted the power to the coil, causing the bead to fall inward, into a much tighter orbit. Reducing power flung it back outward, until the bead stabilized again. 

“Now watch,” the tech said. She reversed the polarity and the bead was hurled away from the coil. In fact, the force shot it up into the empty space above them, where it struck a support with a loud crack, and bounced around here and there for another few seconds. 

“What am I looking at here?” 

“What just happened,” the tech said, “Is, on a very small scale, what happened to us. The installation and the ship interacted much in the same way. The installation trapped us in a negatively charged field, increasing our mass astronomically, then it flipped the polarity, stripping all that mass away, and the—call it the recoil—of that action launched us at tremendous speed toward a linked installation that sent us another signal that told us to reverse the polarity again and slow us down to a reasonable velocity.”

“Us?” 

“Well, it happened automatically. That box, and this—” The tech gestured up at the probe that had been mostly taken apart, except for its drive system, and welded into its bracing. “We think we’ve worked out a way to use the drive system in the probe to cast a similar field, to help the ship shed some of its mass. Coupled with the antiproton output from the probe’s drive, we may be able to do what the navigation system is suggesting.”

“What about fuel?”

“Antimatter annihilation is a lot more efficient than our typical drive output.”

Essa nodded. Efficiency mattered very little, when the fuel tanks ran dry. For a split second Essa considered voicing this concern, but decided just as quickly, that this was the moment for her act like a ship’s captain: she was the woman who was worried by nothing, surprised by nothing, afraid of nothing—not even ordering her crew into certain death. Everything, even scientific mysteries that had recently been revealed to them and the near certitude that they would all die a thousand light years from home, were merely problems to be solved by being broken down into small manageable tasks. “Inform me of any resources you may need,” she said. “Now get to work.”

#

Dissatisfaction on the engineering deck. Essa made her rounds, checking in with the different stations, trying to gauge what materials they might have on hand, or be able to salvage if they needed to construct something for the technicians down below. 

Same on the science deck. Everyone in the labs hovered over their work, staring at data and images. Everyone shaking their heads, and pretending that everything was all right. When Essa left each compartment she heard the voices start up again. The rumors and speculation. They were talking about her, she knew. Everyone talked about the captain. No matter how exciting the mission, after a while, everyone wondered when they would get a chance to step on land again. 

But now—what a day to be captain of a ship. They were likely stranded in this system. And even if they weren’t, another encounter with the installation in this new system might send them another thousand light years farther away. Their trusted, stern, and confident captain was dead, and this untested nymph, scarcely two hundred years old was meant to lead them to safety, when really, all she had been able to think about all morning long was having another roll with her chief science officer. 

On the flight deck, things were similarly grim, only here the officers had information the rest of the crew was starving for, and that was even less reassuring than having no information at all. The third watch navigator was at the console with her first watch counterpart, studying the observational map. They’d detected a total of seven planets now: three rocky inner globes guarded a belt of asteroids and dust. Beyond the belt: two massive gas giants and another composed of clouds of methane ice, each with their own extensive coteries of satellites or rings or both, and finally an outer planet, the tiny frozen world they had just passed, where hydrogen and oxygen lay frozen in the pits of craters, even on the sunny side of the planet. 

The only good news, according to the navigation team was that they might be able to break down some of the frozen solids on the surface of that outer planet to use as fuel, provided they were available in sufficient quantity. It wasn’t much, but it was something. Meanwhile they had a rough map of the orbital paths and their distances from the parent star, and after the next cycle, they would have a reasonably good idea of where everything in the system was. On the main scope, the operator was watching auroras blooming red and green at the northern pole of the planet where they would soon crash, if they didn’t sort out their navigational situation. 

Essa left the bridge. Somehow six hours had passed without her noticing; in eighteen more they would become ensnared in the gas giant’s gravity well, and from there, they would either struggle to break free, slingshot themselves toward the interior of the system, or be pulled beneath the clouds, where they would eventually become incorporated into the planet’s already huge mass. Essa visited the crew deck, and took the time to speak with the different team leaders, all while carefully avoiding Neela, who also kept her distance.

Essa gave orders for the commandos to sweep the exterior of the ship for damage. “Tell them to take the XO in the launch, if they have to,” she told Razia. 

After the crew had eaten, Essa made her way below to meet again with Razia. Orie was there in the main lab space, rubbing at the stained spot where the captain had struck the floor. She didn’t seem to know what to do with her hands when the captain approached her. 

“Captain,” she said, “I—good afternoon.”

Essa gestured for her to be at ease. 

Orie smiled again. As first officer, Essa had rarely ever dealt with her, and up until now her perception of Orie had always been that of a country girl, desperate to get away from home. The scrappy girls who grew up alone in the rough lower layers of the great cities, typically turned to the armed forces. There were too many like her in the research flotilla, young, just out of training, and willing to do just about any job on a ship if it meant the chance to get offworld. These stories only ended well about half of the time in the entertainments girls like Orie watched. Essa knew the ratio was skewed much farther in the direction of unhappy endings. 

“I came to ask about our food stores,” Essa said. “I’d like to see how much we have left.”

“Captain,” Orie said, likely buying time to think. “I—I can do an inventory, if you like. Is this an inspection?”

“No, steward.” It was, in fact a matter of much greater importance, only she couldn’t say so. “I just wanted an estimate.”

“All right.” Orie thought again. She said, “All the fresh fruit and vegetables are gone. We’re down to about half of our stores of rations. So maybe another month’s worth of food. If we’re careful, we could stretch them to six weeks? Then there’s the stuff we keep around for emergencies. That’s another week, maybe two.”

Essa put her hand on Orie’s shoulder and said, “Good work, steward. As you were.”

A call came in from the astronomy lab, and Essa pushed off in that direction. In the science compartments, someone was singing, When I was a maiden, but stopped abruptly when the captain entered. Essa made directly for astronomy, pretending to ignore Neela, who also kept her distance. 

One of the science team was bent over the display from the telescope. Essa saw that she was focused in on the auroras forming over the gas giant. 

“Beautiful, aren’t they?” she said. Essa nodded. “This is strange, though. I thought you might want to see it.”

“What is it?” Essa said. 

The astronomer drew a circle around a small part of the aurora with her finger and the screen zoomed closer, to an area where bolts of lightning seemed to be forming, showering down on the planet’s night side, but from far above the upper reaches of its atmosphere. 

“It could be a moon, close in,” Essa said. 

The astronomer shook her head. “It’s within the planet’s gravitational limits. A moon in that close would be torn apart by tidal forces.” She seemed disappointed that Essa hadn’t already known that. Essa, for her part, remembered a moment too late that the captain never speculated. She would only ask questions, gather the necessary information, and then speak decisively. Lesson learned. The astronomer drew another circle, this time closer to the source of the electrical storm. There was a dark shape, catching some of the reflected light. 

“It’s not a moon,” she said. “And it’s small, too. Maybe less than two kilometers.” 

“Keep an eye on it,” Essa said. “Alert sensors as well.”

Now she went to speak to Neela. It seemed she had waited the appropriate length of time, but as she approached her station in the lab, her comm pinged again, and the tech she’d spoken to earlier said, “I think we’ve figured it out.”

#

Down below, Razia was standing on the outer wall of the cargo bay, hands on her hips, and looking proudly at a piece of equipment her techs and some of the science team and engineers had cobbled together. It didn’t look like much: a shiny cylindrical tube, with feeder conduits leading directly toward the fuel system. 

“What is it?” Essa said. 

“It’s an antimatter trap. As long as we have enough electrical power, we can generate store enough to propel the ship.” After a moment, she said, “We will need to get outside the ship, to finish rigging the conduits.”

“What about the navigation problem.”

“One problem that seems to have sorted itself out on its own. With annihilation fuel, the ship can run at a higher acceleration.”

“And we’ll make the appropriate numbers?”

“I actually think we might be able to do better.”

“How soon until it’s operational?”

“Tomorrow morning at the latest. My team is prepping for EVA already. Then we’ll run a test-fire.”

Essa frowned. It was too close to their anticipated contact with the gas giant. After a moment, Essa said, “See that you get the work done on time.” 

#

Another ten hours had gone by, and most of the crew were retiring from their long workday. Essa stretched. She had missed the evening meal, and this had not gone unnoticed by the crew, many of whom were waiting for her on the science deck. They had heard the news from someone—probably the third watch navigator—about their intercept with the outer gas giant. They wanted to know why the ship hadn’t changed course already. Neela was floating nearby, as though she had the same questions. Essa paused to speak to them, without answering directly, before returning to the flight deck. Neela caught up to her in the companionway. 

“Essa,” she said, her voice a whisper. “I know they’re planning to use antiproton fuel.”

Essa nodded.

“Do you trust them?” Neela said. “Because a even a small droplet of antimatter could destroy the ship.”

Essa reached for Neela’s hand and found it wasn’t there. She understood the risks, she said. 

“I don’t think you do,” Neela answered. “It could kill us all.”

Essa reached again. This time Neela didn’t shrink away. In less than ten hours they’d be dead anyway, she said. It was either this or crash into the outer gas giant. “We don’t have a choice,” Essa said. 

“We do,” Neela said. “We could fire the engines now. It will send us on a longer path, but it will still allow us to return to the installation.”

Essa thought. “The navigation system isn’t working properly,” she said. “And anyhow, a burn of that length will leave us with less than a quarter of our fuel. If we make a mistake our options could become very limited.”

“Like what?”

“Like praying one of the inner planets has a breathable atmosphere,” Essa said. “That it has things growing on it that we can eat, and acceptable weather, and places where we can establish temporary shelters. I know you’ve been examining the planets. Do any of them look even remotely habitable?”

Neela nodded. The second planet looked like it might be worth exploring. There were tears in her eyes. She wasn’t a natural spacer. She often threw up during maneuvers and on long burns. Microgravity played havoc with her body, in ways that it didn’t with others. Ever since they’d met, all Neela had ever wanted to do was to teach planetary science at the University of Serrice. In her expression now, Essa thought she could read the signs that Neela understood she would never get there. She found Neela’s hand, pulled her close, and briefly they floated there, embracing cheek to cheek. 

“Neela,” Essa whispered. “We have to try this. Who knows if anyone will ever come for us.” 

Neela held tight and wouldn’t let go. “I—I don’t want to die out here,” she said. 

“We won’t,” Essa said. It almost felt true. 

# 

In another hour, the commando team was prepped for their second EVA in less than twelve hours. Some of the science team had suited up as well, to help move the necessary materials to the exterior of the ship. The work would continue for another six or seven hours, they estimated. Essa saw them off then monitored their work first from the aft observation post, and then later from the flight deck. During that time the outer gas giant went from a modestly sized speck in their viewscreen, to a distinct object Essa could scarcely block out with her thumb. 

The planet was tilted sharply on its axis, and streaks of clouds, brown and yellow and red, the products of violent winds, streaked across its southern limb. They had five hours now, perhaps a little less. Meanwhile the sound of the work outside rattled through the hull. 

The second mate came to relieve Essa, and she went to the crew deck to have something to eat and try to get some sleep. She found herself unwilling to retire to her bag in the alcove behind the galley. She felt sick, but didn’t want to show it, so instead went looking for Orie, who was still awake, and standing at her station, her feet fed through the cloth loops that held her in place while she worked. 

“Captain?” she said. “Is everything all right?” 

“I’m fine, Orie. How are you holding up?”

She shrugged. “You know me. I go wherever the wind takes me.”

“I suppose you do.”

“Did you need anything, Captain?”

“No,” Essa said. “I just thought I’d see how the crew is doing.”

Orie smiled. “If we make it through this, maybe I’ll tell you.”

Essa rose. She wanted to go back to the flight deck, but her body wanted to sleep. She hovered in the middle of the crew deck until a commotion on the exterior of the hull made the decision for her. A moment later the comms came to life. 

“Captain,” it was the acting XO, “you’re needed on the flight deck.”

Essa hurried up the companionway. The gas giant loomed ahead, directly in their path now, filling the viewscreen. 

“One of the commandos lost her footing,” the XO said. “She’s adrift behind the ship.”

“Can we reach her?”

The XO didn’t answer right away. “Maybe in the launch.”

It would take almost an hour to prep the launch for flight. Essa shook her head. “How is the work on the drive going?”

“All but done,” the XO said. “They were getting ready to bring in the remaining materials when the accident happened. 

Essa thought for a moment. She said, “Tell the crew to space all non essential gear and come inside at once.” To the XO she said, “Can you prep the launch?”

“That’s the other problem,” the XO said. “We’re going to have to execute our burn in the next twenty or thirty minutes to avoid—contact.”

“If we wait, there are two moons whose orbital paths would block an easy exit from the system,” the navigator added.

“She’s trying to catch us with her own thrusters, but they don’t have much power. They’ve slowed her rate of separation, but it’s unlikely she’ll catch up to us in time.”

“We have disposable thruster units,” the XO said. “One of our team might be able to catch her if she took more than one.” 

Down below, was the sound of the airlock cycling. The first group of the EVA crew was returning. Two more and they could secure the ship for acceleration. On a jury-rigged and as yet untested system. Goddess, what had she been thinking? The words, lost with all hands passed through her mind, a horror to anyone who had ever ventured out to sea, or into space, but infinitely worse for the captain giving the orders. 

“We can’t risk losing another,” Essa said, “when one is already lost for certain. As she spoke, Razia came onto the flight deck. 

“I just heard about Nerai,” she said. “What are your plans?”

“We will have to execute our burn before we can secure her,” Essa said. 

“You’re not going after her?”

Essa shook her head. “She won’t catch up to us with the thrusters on her suit,” she said. 

“No,” Razia said. “She used to up too much fuel earlier during the work.”

“Everything else we might try is too risky,” Essa said. 

“What about in the launch?”

“If we send the launch, we risk losing your commando, the pilot, and the launch. If we wait, we’ll be captured in the gravity well, and pulled in toward the planet, where we will eventually crash, if the electromagnetic radiation doesn’t kill us first. The only other option is to use personal thrusters. I’m not asking anyone else to risk her life for—for anyone.”

“You’re not going to do anything?”

Essa held Razia’s gaze until she looked away. “I’m not,” she said. “We have no good options. Down below the airlock cycled again. “Prepare the ship for acceleration,” Essa said. “Five minutes. The final team will have to sit through the burn in their suits.”

Razia reached down and grabbed Essa by the collar of her uniform. Her eyes were wild with despair, anger, resignation—something—as she tried to pull Essa up and out of her seat. The straps held her down. 

“Get off my flight deck,” she said. “Unless you wish to join her.”

Razia pulled herself together. She let go of Essa’s uniform and drifted away from her, coming to rest against the navigator’s console. “No—,” she said. “It’s—I’m—Just give me a moment to say goodbye.”

Essa nodded, and the sensors operator handed Razia a headset. Down below the airlock cycled as the last of the EVA team came back inside. Essa gave the secure ship order. In three minutes they would be underway, or dead, whichever. 

Razia put on the headset. She said, “Nerai, can you hear me?”

“I can, Commandant.”

“Can you make it back to the ship?”

“I’ve reversed direction, but it will take me some time to catch up to you.”

“The captain—we—we’ve talked over the situation. We can’t reach you.”

There was a pause, and Nerai coughed. “I know, commandant.”

“We—are going to have to leave you behind.”

“I know, commandant.” Her voice was soft. Not calm, almost a sob, not quite.

“I’m sorry. We’re all sorry.”

There was a long pause, no sound, as though Nerai had shut off her radio. Then the heard her breathing, fast, then getting control of herself. “I know,” she said. “It’s all right.”

“Ninety second, captain,” the navigator said. Their path projected onto the screen in front of Essa’s seat. Something about it looked wrong. 

Essa said to Razia, “You need to be strapped in.” 

Razia nodded. “Farewell, Nerai.”

There was a sound from Nerai’s end. Not quite a word. 

Razia shook her head and took off the earphones. Handing them back to the sensors operator, she said, wiping a hand over her eyes, “I’m sorry, Captain. You think it gets easier, don’t you? It doesn’t. It only ever gets worse. Remember that.”

She disappeared down the companionway, and ten seconds later reported she was secured on the crew deck. 

“Execute the burn,” Essa said.


	14. Consensus

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Liara deals with unexpected consequences from trying to help Varian.

Liara was in her cabin, taking off clothing she had worn on Esan. The quarian’s blood had soaked through the outer layer, and into her undergarments. She stripped them off and stood naked in front of the mirror, looking at the scar that began below her navel and cut upward toward her ribs. A bit of reaper metal that had penetrated her hardsuit during the last push to the Conduit, as she and Shepard fought their way through the ruins of London. Stupid, getting wounded, Liara thought, both then and now. She should have died. Instead she’d fallen, clutching her stomach, and bleeding from a dozen more minor wounds had cried out for help. 

She still remembered Shepard shouting at her to get back to the ship. You’re in no condition to fight. Those words had stung, true as they had been. She would have followed to the end. She would have preferred it that way. An ending, instead of this, this consequence-ridden existence she had made for herself. No, instead, she had let Vega drag her onto the ramp of the Normandy, and then—gently—carry her up to the med bay, where Chakwas had taken out seventeen bladelike shards of metal, some of them long as a finger. For a time, Liara had kept them in a jar, on the countertop of her little prefabricated housing pod on Earth, during those awful years after the war. Then one day, in the middle of the night no less, she’d risen from bed, picked up the jar, and buried the shrapnel in the mud by the entrance to the encampment where she lived. 

The scar had not healed well. It stretched and pulled. Sometimes it still felt like the metal was still there, in the skin and muscle of her abdomen. It would not heal any better than it already had, not that she wanted it to, she liked having the reminder of those last few moments with Shepard, even if she’d been badly wounded, even though, she’d only been able to see Shepard’s face through a veil of pain and her own blood. Now, there was a stain of quarian blood there on her stomach, on her chest, a thread of it tracing the shape of her hip, down her leg to the interior of her thigh. 

Liara rinsed off in the shower. She had no wounds of her own. Not today. 

Strange things, bodies. Medicine kept advancing, but our bodies remain prehistoric constructs that adapt imperfectly to the science we apply to them. Liara thought of the young quarian woman, her belly ripped open by gunfire. And of the second man she’d shot back on Esan. The first had been a turian, facing away from her. Shooting him in the back of the head had been more straightforward. The second one though, a human, probably in his forties, with a shimmer of silver-gray stubble on his chin, had had a second to turn his head after he’d seen his comrade killed. Long enough to see Liara coming at him. His angry features had gone soft, as though some part of him were already letting go as she leveled her weapon. And then she had taken aim, and blasted a daisy-shaped hole in his face. 

Liara wondered if the quarian would live. She put on a new outfit, and made her way to the lower deck to see how things were going. 

#

Four hours earlier, she and Varian had been running through the ruins of the Daybreak colony, in search of a place for Alera to land the ship. Finding nothing nearby, they had climbed the anthill again, where the observation deck made as good a landing site any other. Down below, beyond the cratered terrain, they saw the two Specials dropships throttling up their engines in order to give pursuit, while closer by, a platoon of Specials had fallen out of formation to take positions and fire at the ship with their rifles and grenade launchers as it flew away. 

In orbit was a cruiser-class ship of human design. Old military surplus, but reliable, painted in the Hornet’s colors: black over yellow. It would take them time to recover their dropships, and to get their drives spun up to give chase, but still the ship angled on them and fired its main gun at least twice. Two frigate-class craft were dropping out of FTL as Liara’s ship departed the system. Alera tracked them as they accelerated away, back toward the Omega-2 relay. The frigates turned to give chase, but fortunately they were running hot and had to stop to dump their waste heat before continuing. If it had taken Alera any longer to get airborne, likely they would have been caught between the cruiser and frigates. 

Assuming they had been the primary targets of the attack. And likely they had been. 

Meanwhile, Liara carried the quarian aboard. Varian’s ankle had finally given out on the way back up the hill. The quarian was still alive when she set her down on the table in the med bay, but things didn’t look good. 

Blood everywhere: the clean bedding, Liara’s clothing, the floor. A sizeable pool of it had formed in the young quarian’s body pressed against Liara’s. The quarian’s fragile-looking limbs dangled limp over the edges of the table, her eyes were only half-open, her pupils dilated. But she’d still been breathing. Drummond and Letha had gone to work. Strapping her down for the rough takeoff and possible evasive maneuvers, while also also setting up several bags of synthetic blood for a transfusion. 

Liara had helped as much as she could, but finally Drummond had pushed her out of the door, sealing it behind her with a swipe of her hand. Once they’d cleared orbit, and were no longer dodging cannon rounds from the cruiser, they had started the surgical drone, and let it do its work, cauterizing, debriding, suturing. 

“It was a kind thing to do,” Letha said later to Varian. “Pointless. But kind.” 

Varian retreated to the communal head to get cleaned up and change his clothing, leaving a trail of bloody footprints on the floor tiles as he went. 

At top speed, it would take them three hours to reach the Omega-2 relay. And from there, about another day to reach and dock at the Citadel, as safe a place as any. 

#

Liara found Varian standing at the window to the med bay. The surgical drone was still working on the quarian, a good sign. It meant she had not yet died. She’d taken nearly ten units of synthetic blood already. The fabricators were working on more, though it would be a race to see if they could produce enough before they ran out. 

Varian had bathed, and put on a fresh, though ill-fitting, outfit. He was leaning with his injured foot off the floor, and an icepack wrapped around it. Letha was inside, monitoring the machines. 

“How is she?” Liara said. 

Varian shook his head. “She may not thank us for saving her. If she survives.”

Liara nodded. Drummond came by and explained in detail what had happened. The wound was from a single shotgun blast. Twenty flechettes had made it through her armor, penetrated her back, and then exploded. The injuries were actually made worse by the plating covering her abdomen, because they had reflected the explosive force back into her body. The bowel was torn open in a dozen places, and two major blood vessels had been lacerated. It was a miracle that she hadn’t bled out before she reached the med bay at all. She would need muscle and skin grafts, and massive doses of antibiotics to fight infection. 

“Recovering from wounds like this might make her wish she had died,” Drummond said. 

Liara shook her head. Varian pointed. “The drone is stopping. Is that good?”

“I don’t know,” Drummond said. Touching the intercom, she said, “Letha? What’s happening?”

Letha studied the displays. “It says it’s finished its program.” She began cleaning up, when she suddenly stopped and said, “This is odd. Doctor, could you come in here? Something is happening.” 

Liara threw the door open and went inside. 

“Here,” Letha said, pointing at one of the screens. “Look at this.”

The screen showed a diagram of the quarian’s body, the work the drone had done to her, and places where bleeding was still occurring. But beneath the readouts was a single line that read, Consensus Entity 2.194-3387 requests communication with the one known as Dr. T’Soni.

The line went blank, replaced with a blinking cursor. The message reappeared. Liara wondered how long it had been there before Letha had noticed it.

“What do you make of that?” Letha said. Liara glanced down at the electrodes stuck to the quarian’s body. One was quite close to the symbiote consensus implanted behind her right ear. 

“I believe her symbiotes are trying to speak to us.”

The line filled with text again. Requesting private communication with Dr. Liara T’Soni. The line flashed and went blank again. 

Liara said, “What does it want?” 

Requesting private communication, the line wrote back. Liara sighed, and said, “Can you hear me?”

The console printed, Yes.

“I will speak with you. On this console only. You will not have access to my ship’s systems.” Liara felt the hollowness of the condition she was setting. If the symbiotes had made it as far as this console, they were likely everywhere. They could in theory shut down the ship’s drives and make it drop out of FTL, or overload them, causing them to detonate. “Accept my bargain or this conversation will end.”

Accepted, wrote the consensus. Letha left the medbay, but stood watching from the window, where Liara saw her speaking to Varian. 

“What do you want of me?” Liara said. 

Dr. T’Soni is known to Us, as is her mother, the matriarch called Benezia. 

Liara stared at the console. It was, to say the least, odd to interact with a faceless being. “You still aren’t answering my question,” Liara said. 

Matriarch Benezia became a slave to the Old Machines. Dr. T’Soni worked to stop the Old Machines with Shepard Commander, who freed Our consensus from the creators. The line went blank, and began filling again: Benezia came to Esan. We are aware of this. Some of Our hosts were searching for signs of her. At Our suggestion.

“How did they know where to look?”

Process of elimination. There was time to deduce. We assisted.

“Time?”

Our information came more than two days ago, while a salvage ship was enroute to this system. It was diverted from its original mission, based on Our information. 

“When you say ‘our information,’ you mean your consensus?”

Yes.

“Who informed you?”

There was a distinct hesitation before the line filled again. This Consensus Entity is in contact with Others. They informed Us.

“You know what I’m asking,” Liara said. “Who gave you the information?”

We do not know them by name. Data packets are deposited for another Entity. These are collected by a Host, who shares the data with this Consensus. The line cleared and began filling again. A Creator Host retrieves these packets and renders them readable to Us. It is possible the Entity’s Host does not know what It is doing. 

“Who is this host?” Liara said. 

Unknown. Host Shen would have known. Host Shen is dead, as is the rest of its team. This host, body name Ashana nar Vesta was aware of neither Host nor Entity. 

“Then you are of no use to me, symbiote,” Liara said. 

We anticipated this response. Host Ashana still lives. If so, We may prove useful to you. If you give Us access to the ship’s communications array, We may access the Greater Consensus. There was a pause, as though the Entity was arguing with itself. If permitted, We could…inform…Others that Host Ashana was the lone survivor of Host Shen’s team. We could provide biometrical data to confirm this. In this way Our entry to the greater Consensus will not be questioned. Another pause. In this manner We may learn the source of the data.

“What is it to you,” Liara said, “that my mother came to Esan? It was centuries before the quarians created the geth.”

Unknown. Information retrieved on Citadel indicated data is relevant to high-level intelligence operatives working within the asari government. Not critical to Consensus or Host survival. Still relevant to Our concerns, and those of Our hosts.

“So you’re—curious?”

Curiosity is a biological concern. We merely seek data. Perhaps it is the same.

“I can’t simply let you have access to our array,” Liara said. “Not based on what you’re telling me.” The screen on the monitors watching the quarian’s vital signs changed to show a still image from the video message her mother had left behind. Liara gasped, and said, “Goddess, where did you get this?”

The same location you did. At present, We are still unaware of the message’s meaning.

“As am I,” Liara said. “Is Host vas Mesto responsible for transmitting this information to you?”

No. We are not aware of host vas Mesto being Our source. Our plan is to determine the nature of the source. Our plans aid yours. 

“So you say,” Liara said. “I’m old enough to remember a different geth.”

We are aware of Our past actions. Denying Us access to your communications array is understandable. Your mistrust, however is unwarranted. Dr. T’Soni has done much for the Consensus.

“Whether I wanted to or not, I gather.” Liara looked at the ceiling, then down at the quarian, who lay under a reflective blanket. From underneath the shiny material protruded three small tubes, two of them drains pulling blood and other materials from the quarian’s abdominal cavity, and one more for urine. She was beautiful, this Ashana nar Vesta, despite the tube that breathed for her, leaving her tongue to protrude from the corner of her mouth. Her pretty almond-shaped eyes were shut, and her skin was pale, gray almost, her curly hair hidden underneath a cap meant to contain the spread of bacteria. “What do you get out of this? I still don’t understand, and until I do, I will not assist you.”

We ask your permission. We could simply seize control. We do not do this out of what you call respect. Our aims are of no concern to you.

“They are,” Liara said. “As far as I know symbiotes die with the host. Unless they can access the Consensus directly. Isn’t that so?”

Yes.

Liara turned and found a syringe. She filled it with air and pressed the tip against the quarian’s neck. “If I were to kill the host—”

Don’t. 

“Admit it, aren’t you merely trying to escape?”

No. After a pause, the line went blank. New text appeared: Yes. We want to live. After another pause, the Consensus wrote, We also wish to serve. Benezia fell to the Old Machines. Anyone interested in Matriarch Benezia must be considered suspect. 

“I am interested in Matriarch Benezia,” Liara said. “Am I suspect, too?”

No. You are the exception. Dr. T’Soni assisted Shepard Commander against the Old Machines. Dr. T’Soni is…trusted amongst the Consensus.

“And you want to live,” Liara said. She spoke with contempt, but in that moment she saw again the man she’d killed, the daisy-shaped hole her shotgun had carved in his face. Everyone, everything wanted to live. There were no exceptions. She withdrew the needle and with a sigh, she said, “Tell me the specifics of your plan.”


	15. Uncharted Worlds

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Essa and a small team investigate a new system's one habitable planet, looking for food and water. They find something else down there with them.

The Nixia was passing overhead again. There it was, a little star in the darkening sky that ran quickly from the southwestern horizon, toward the northeast. In another ten minutes it would disappear toward the planet’s far side where the sun was just beginning to rise, and again fall out of radio contact for an hour, until it appeared again, over their part of the planet. 

Turning her attention again to ground level, Essa saw Neela, who presided over a tarpaulin, laid out on the ground with a number of different plant specimens—seed pods and fruit samples, for the most part. For the past two days she and two of her team had been working twenty hour days, cataloging everything they could find, while also trying to determine what varieties of plants—and possibly animals, if they could find any of those—that they might be able to eat. They had a few candidates, though most of these were what appeared seeds and nuts, which meant complex proteins, which meant likely a source of potentially deadly toxins or allergens. For the past two days, Neela and one of the commandos who had come down to provide security, had been rubbing samples extracted from these on their skin, to check for allergic or toxic reactions. So far Neela had gone into shock twice and had to be revived. The commando had fared about as well, though she also complained bitterly about an itch whose source no one could determine. 

Meanwhile, they had located a water source, a murky, stagnant pool, covered over in something that looked like duckweed. Orie had gone there with one of the other commandos and set up her destillation gear. 

So far, no one had seen any large animals, save for a few palm-sized creatures much like fish on Thessia in the muddy water. 

Two days on solid ground. She had let herself cherish the sensation, because who knew when she would feel it again, and counted herself lucky that she was the only person on the crew who was rated to pilot the launch in atmospheric flight. 

Essa had set the launch down in a level field of fernlike plants that grew to about shoulder height. They had managed to hack out an area in the ferns to make an encampment, as well as a number of trails that connected different areas of their operation. The clearing stretched out for almost a kilometer in every direction before it reached the ragged edge of forest that spread beyond, rising from the lowland where they currently found themselves, to a range of tall mountains, some hundred kilometers to their west. The Nixia reported seeing snow falling, and a massive weather system on the far side of the mountains. Already the peaks were disappearing into clouds, and Essa could see long tails of snow blowing out over the western slopes. 

They would have to ride out whatever weather those clouds would bring. When they’d landed, dirt blown up from the sandy ground had clogged one of the maneuvering thrusters. They’d had to remove it entirely to unstick the gimbals, and until it was reinstalled, they couldn’t take off. In the meantime, the weather was hot and humid. A few kilometers to the east was a wide and shallow bay filled with salt water as clear as from a fountain. Flying in they had seen large creatures swimming, though the arrival of the ship seemed to have startled them and made them run for deeper water. 

Essa returned to the space underneath the shuttle’s belly, where she and Arana, whose arm seemed to be mending well, were working on the dismantled thruster. Arana had taken apart the entire assembly and laid the components out on a tarpaulin. Whenever Essa stepped away to check on the progress of the other operations, she always returned to find Arana looking off toward the edge of the forest, as though she’d seen something moving there. 

It was a strange planet. The star cast a glow similar to Parnitha’s. Many of the plants growing nearby seemed to have adapted to their world much the way the plants on Thessia had. The breeze was warm and pleasant. The things that grew and lived here all seemed to make sense, and yet were still terribly unfamiliar. The bits of fluff that carried on the breeze and that seemed to be seedpods scattered by the wind, had on closer inspection turned out to be the means of locomotion for tiny arthropods that burrowed into the sand at night, and reemerged to continue their windborne travels the next morning. The trees growing in the distance had black bark and blue leaves threaded with red veins that seemed almost to pulse and throb when touched. The forest itself gave off a stench of rotting meat, and Neela suggested that some of the plants might be carnivorous. Perhaps because of this, they had decided not to advance too far beyond their clearing in search of food. 

In other ways, even the planet’s ecosystem seemed odd. There were no large creatures stirring. No birds swooping and diving to consume the drifting arthropods, though they would have made easy prey for dozens of species back home. Every so often the breeze carried a chill, as though the seasons were changing. And other times, there was a scent that traveled in from somewhere, the stink of scorched metal, of old fires, and ancient dust. Everywhere in the clearing, Essa and the others kept finding granules of solidified metal, some as tiny as ball bearings, others as large as a fist. Neela had suggested collecting them to be melted down later, but Essa had only shaken her head. All their available takeoff weight had to be reserved for potable water and any food they might be able to find. 

Turning again to Arana, Essa ducked low under the edge of the launch’s wing. “Where are we with the thruster?” she said. 

Arana shook her head. “I don’t even know how this happened.” She showed Essa some of the parts. “I’ve cleared out most of these,” she said, “but I’ll need more time to finish.” She put her hands on her knees and sighed, then said “The Nixia just radioed to say we have weather incoming.”

“So I hear,” Essa said. She stepped out from underneath the shuttle. The ship was almost directly overhead now. The sky was almost completely dark, and already a line of thick haze was blocking out the first evening stars. The radio pinged again.

“Planetside actual,” Essa said. 

“Nixia actual.” There was a bit of static then the XO’s voice came back. “Captain. Infrared picked up something on the ground not far from your location.”

“Go ahead.”

“The first is that there appears to be something just to your north, about five kilometers beyond the edge of the forest.”

“What is it?”

“Impossibe to say. It’s considerably colder than its surroundings. It seems to be a structure of some sort.”

“Not a cave?”

“No, ma’am. It’s too regular in shape.” The XO forwarded the images to the small screen on Essa’s wrist tool. There it was: a series of nested rings, around a circular enclosure. A stronghold, she thought, but didn’t say. 

“And there aren’t any heat sources? There’s no equipment running? No vehicles going in and out?”

“None that we can see.” 

“What’s the terrain between here and there?” 

“It’s relatively flat. Not many watercourses.” 

“We’ll investigate,” Essa said. “At daybreak.”

She looked out at the sky again, where the Nixia was about to plunge beneath the line of trees to their north. She gave a loud whistle to call everyone back. Over the past two days they’d resorted to using such sounds as a means of communicating, mostly to conserve the batteries on their personal radios. 

In a few minutes everyone had assembled at camp, including Orie and the commando who had been posted to watch over her. They both looked as though they’d been rolling around together in the mud—and for all Essa knew, they had been. She didn’t care, as long as Orie kept the distiller and food dehydrators running smoothly. 

“Evening meal,” Essa said. Everyone sat and opened their packets. When they were all close to finishing, Essa stood up and said, “I know you’ve all been feeling a little chill in the air. There is a weather system moving in. We need to make sure the campsite is ready. There’s no time to wait for morning. All of our loose gear needs to go back inside the launch as soon as you’re done eating. And I want everyone to either sleep onboard or take shelter under the ship until we know what we’re dealing with.”

Everyone nodded. It was a hassle, but a small one, given that most everyone here was likely overjoyed to even be standing flat-footed on a planet, rather than floating around inside the Nixia’s tiny compartments. They all made to stand, but Essa gestured that they wait another moment. 

“There’s one other thing,” she said. “Scans have shown that there is some kind of structure—we don’t know its nature—about five kilometers beyond the edge of the forest to our north. Once this weather system has passed I will take a small team to investigate.”

The rest of the crew exchanged a look. Essa merely stood and waited to see if they would ask any questions. When none came, she said, “I will be selecting my team in the morning. In the meantime, you have your orders.” 

The weather didn’t turn until night had come in full and most of the crew, except for the commando keeping watch, and Essa who couldn’t sleep, were the only two awake. The air turned cold. The plants, adapted to the weather, seemed to know what to do, and the fernlike ground cover rolled up their leaves and fronds so that now they were only waist high. Essa could see all the way to the edge of the forest without assistance. 

She found the commando patrolling around the outside of the launch. She didn’t appear to notice the cold at all, as she switched between the starlight and infrared scopes she wore on a lanyard around her neck. 

“Captain,” she said, when Essa approached her. 

“I suppose I’m not very quiet,” Essa said. 

“You’re not.” Essa only nodded and waited for the status report she knew was coming. “I don’t see anything moving,” the commando said. Essa said something and was about to leave, but the commando stopped her. “Don’t you think it’s odd?”

“What’s odd?”

“That we haven’t seen anything stirring.” She gestured, and then looked at the ground. She appeared to be thinking something over. She said, “And I’m not talking about those little bugs that drift on the wind, or the tiny fish in the lake.” She paused to spit on the ground. Essa saw that she was chewing on one of the seedpods Neela had discarded earlier, having determined it had little nutritional value, though it did contain a mild stimulant. “Goddess, this stuff is nasty.” She spat again then went on, “I was on an operation once, up in the north. We were—well, never mind what we were doing—that’s not even what I’m trying to tell you. Up by the pole, it gets cold, not much growing, not that there’s even much soil up there. Still, there are little trees, and mosses and so on. But there’s life. Lots of it. Watching on my scopes like this, I would have seen at least a dozen animals of different sizes on Thessia. Predators. Prey. Here, not a creature bigger than my thumb.”

Perhaps they’d scared these animals away with their big loud ship, Essa thought, though she didn’t say it. Instead she turned to the commando, and said, “What are you suggesting?”

“Something went terribly wrong here,” she said. Essa nodded. She didn’t know what that meant, but made a note to discuss it with Neela at daybreak. “The system is out of joint.” When Essa didn’t add anything, the commando said, “I’m sorry about Tenneya. I don’t want you to think we wanted her to come to harm.”

“What did you want then?”

“We had our orders. They’ve been carried out. We don’t want anything.” 

The commando moved on, continuing her patrol, and the radio crackled. The Nixia was passing overhead, hidden now behind a veil of clouds. It was bitter cold, and the wind was beginning to cut. Essa adjusted the heater unit in her uniform and received the status report from the ship as it passed overhead.

That done, she hurried away from the commando’s patrol area, into a place amongst the ferns where there was still a little cover for her to hide. Here, she opened her wrist tool and connected it to her earpiece, playing back the recording she’d made of Nerai’s final transmissions. As she had done each of the past ten nights, ever since their departure from the outer edge of the system, she listened to Nerai’s breathing. Over the course of about an hour, Nerai sobbed, panicked, shouted curses at Essa and the rest of the crew, and then finally seemed to come to some sort of peace with what had happened to her. Eventually the ship had curved around the far side of the gas giant, and Nerai’s voice had disappeared into a wave of static. Never to return, Essa thought.

It wasn’t until two days later, having run an analysis of the recording through a processor that no one on the science deck needed, that Essa learned there was one final transmission, another hour after the initial recording stopped. She didn’t know what to make of it, but there, out of the ether came Nerai’s voice one more time. She would have had enough air and water in the suit to last her several days, but by then, if Nerai kept to the same trajectory as she had been, she likely would have been close to the gas giant’s upper atmosphere. And there came her voice, breathing hard, seeming disoriented, and saying, I don’t—? Who—who are you? I can feel you near me but where? What is it—where—you? before her voice gave out in a fit of panicked breathing, and she uttered the word Goddess, a whisper, almost unintelligible. 

Essa liked to think she wasn’t just tormenting herself, listening to the recording. She’d heard stories of those in command who often resorted to this sort of thing, replaying events, questioning their judgment. Quietly, during the long hours of the night when sleep wouldn’t come. Matriarch T’Loria was said to have driven herself mad running a simulation of the final battle of the Armali Salient every night before retiring to bed, looking for a way things might not have ended with her encirclement and the unconditional surrender of her forces at Atrian. If, perhaps, her western flank had held until evening instead of collapsing at midday, exposing her divisions of armored reserves, unprepared and out of formation, to easy destruction by the air and ground forces of the United Republics; or if the gains she’d made in the days before the counterassault had been able to reinforce their positions in the evening before the battle; or if her own supply lines hadn’t been so long that fuel and ammunition hadn’t been in such short supply. No, she had realized ultimately, too much had gone wrong for her for anything to have gone right in the end. And so she’d put her pistol to the roof of her mouth and pulled the trigger. 

Essa shook the thought out of her head. Officers and crew each suffered each in their own way. Now she was just seeing it from the other side. Command was lonely; the crew had each other. As she played the recording of Nerai’s voice one last time, Essa realized she would have done just about anything to have Captain Tenneya back, if only so she wouldn’t have to feel this way. 

They’d been on the planet for two days already. They would have to stay another two or three, until they’d collected enough water and food, provided any of the food turned out to be edible. But then, there it was: daybreak, and a new set of struggles and obstacles to be met, head-on. 

#

In the dawn light the assembled crew stood looking not at all refreshed from their few hours of sleep, and squinting out suspiciously at the now frozen landscape. Frost crackled underfoot, and a thick layer of clouds remained, though light from the star still filtered through, glinting off the jagged crystals of ice that had formed on all the rolled up fronds. 

Orie went out to check on her gear, returning a few minutes later to say the pond had frozen over, though the ice wasn’t thick. She fetched a few tools and ran back to work, the commando who had watched over her the day before followed at a slower pace, her uniform still smudged with dirt. Essa checked with Arana about the remaining repairs, and then picked her team: one commando, Neela, and one of the other scientists, Meria, who had also spent several years training with a militia unit outside Armali, and who knew how to throw up a protective barrier should they need it. 

They loaded up what gear they had, pouches of water, a few hand tools that could under duress double as weapons, scientific instruments, rations, and a large tarpaulin and reflective blankets for shelter in case the weather turned on them again. 

“We’re lucky it didn’t rain,” Neela said. “If the ground became saturated, our landing gear might get stuck.”

Essa nodded, and left instructions with the crew to see what they could do about shoring up the ground underneath the landing struts, just in case. Then it was time to leave. 

They marched to the northern edge of the forest, using a trail one of the commandos had hacked in the ferns after they landed. The forest itself was surrounded by a wall of brambles and creeping vines that resisted the first few blows from their bush tools, and finally gave way to the forest beyond. 

It wasn’t as dark as she’d expected. The trees had, to a large degree, curled up their leaves, and seemed to be trying to hibernate through the frost period, leaving large gaps of light between them. At ground level, the forest floor was covered with a thick layer rotting material that reeked of death. The trees themselves were gnarled and twisted things, bent and shaped by the wind that made them squat on their low, multi-footed trunks. Amber sap oozed from cracks in the trees’ outer shells that looked more like scaly skin than tree bark. 

Neela snapped a few pictures, then stopped and said, “It’s odd. It seems like there’s only one kind of tree. Almost like this was a plantation once.” She gathered up a sample of the sap, then hurried to catch up to Essa and the rest. She seemed uneasy, as though something were lurking somewhere, waiting to attack. 

But the forest seemed dormant, nothing but masses of roots swelling out through the old soil, and squat trunks on their buttressed roots. The smell abated after a few minutes, and the trees merely shivered their leaves in the wind. There was no sign of any animal activity. As they went, they found more circular clearings, none bigger than a few hundred meters across, all of them perfectly round, and most of them scattered with more granules and ingots of metal. 

“What do you make of these?” Essa said to Neela. 

Neela shrugged. “Maybe from a meteorite,” she said. “But they’re everywhere. The don’t seem to be from a natural process.” 

The commando spoke up for the first time. Her name was Liss. “If I didn’t know better,” she said, “I’d say these were old bomb craters.”

“How so,” Neela asked.

“They’re too regular,” Liss said. “Whatever made these fragments, it’s poisoning the ground. Keeping things from growing back the way they were.”

“We’ve scanned for radiation,” Neela said, mostly to herself. 

“Plenty of things out there are just as bad,” Liss said. 

After another two kilometers they found what looked like the remains of a thick city wall, and another kilometer beyond that, they found an area where the forest had grown over the foundations of a city, the roots bursting through old walls and filling the pits left behind by the former structures. Neela was lagging behind to document something that looked like writing on one of the few walls that was still standing, when the ground opened up and she fell through to the level below. 

Essa heard her yelp when she hit the bottom, but it took another ten minutes to locate her. She had landed on her back, in a tangle of roots and vines that had burst through the surrounding walls. Apparently unhurt, she was tangled and couldn’t get clear on her own. The rest of them climbed down to free her. 

As Essa was helping her to the ground, Liss called out from up ahead. 

“There’s a tunnel over here,” she said. “We might be able to follow it.”

Neela gave Essa a look that seemed to suggest, Why the devil would we do that? Essa only helped to brush some dust away from Neela’s uniform, before moving ahead to where Liss had hunkered down at the entrance to the tunnel. Looking down, it looked like an old water conduit. A small rivulet of water ran down the center of the tunnel, as it sloped down, toward whatever they might find at its eventual end. Essa consulted the images from the Nixia. It looked as though the tunnel might right on a straight line to the center of the complex. Every hundred meters or so, the ceiling had collapsed, leaving the ground heaped with debris, but letting in a good bit of light from above. 

“What do you think?” Essa said to Liss. 

“Looks like it could be a straight shot to where we’re going,” she said. 

“Or a place where we could get cornered,” Neela said. 

Liss nodded. “We’ll have to be ready for that,” she said, and held out her hand, where a little ball of blue energy welled in her palm. She held her thermal scope to her eye and said, “There’s nothing down there. Not that I can see.”

They went on like that for an hour, their progress impeded by tree roots that penetrated through the walls of the tunnel, and by heaps of rubble. It was cold inside the tunnel; a steady current of air from the surface followed them, blowing constantly at their backs. Soon enough they found out why. 

The tunnel came to what seemed like a dead end. Liss held up a hand to signal everyone to stop. Ahead of her, a wall made of some kind of stone, untouched by the weather, for however long this structure had been standing. Engraved into its surface were what appeared to be several phrases, written in the same—though here somewhat more elaborate—writing Essa had seen painted on the walls aboard the installation that had transported them to this system. Neela stepped forward reaching out her hand as though she wanted to touch them, but Liss grabbed her by the elbow and pulled her back. The toes of Neela’s boots were dangling over the edge of a pit, deep enough that Essa couldn’t see the bottom of it. 

“Thanks,” Neela whispered. She let her breath out slowly, and it made a fog in the air in front of her. The cold wind was blowing into the tunnels below them, Essa realized; perhaps channeling the air and the wind in such a manner had been part of the structure’s design. 

“We can go around,” Essa said, but Liss was already fixing a rope to the wall. 

“Straight down is faster,” she said. 

The small channel they took down below emptied at the edge of a massive, circular cavern. In here, there was enough space to have built an entire city, and perhaps at one time there had been, judging by rubble that that stood here and there. 

“They were trying to cool this place down,” Essa said. “But why?”

“To mask their heat signature,” Liss said. She pointed up ahead to the center of the massive gallery opened. Here obvious signs of a blast that had opened a hole in the ceiling. A column of light slashed downward, and a small stand of withered trees stood, reaching up toward it. 

Under the skylight made by the blast, they stopped to eat, and gather their thoughts. All around them in the circular cavern, every fifty meters or so along the edge of the space was a vent similar to the one they’d come down, each one spilling water. Whatever had made the hole had somehow cut through several dozen meters of reinforced concrete and rock. 

“I wonder who lived here,” Meria said. She and Neela were comparing the engravings they’d seen earlier with the writing they’d found on the installation. 

“Most of the symbols look familiar,” Neela said. “These others must be different parts of their writing system, or maybe from a different dialect.”

Liss looked up at the hole in the roof of the cavern. “Whoever it was, they must have made their last stand here,” Liss said.

“What makes you say that?” Neela asked.

“Look at this place,” Liss said. “The water runs in from cold springs. Keeps the place cool, so there’s no infrared signature, but the cooling happens by natural means, so it doesn’t look too suspicious. From orbit this place might have been invisible, or perhaps mistaken for a sewage system. Who ever lived here, they were trying to hide. Or wait something out. But whatever they were hiding from, it found them, blew a hole in their roof and burned whatever was left to rubble.” 

“Found them?” Meria said. “It could have been a meteorite.”

“Meteorites don’t usually score direct hits,” Liss said. She picked up a lump of something from the ground, and tossed it into Neela’s lap. “This is melted glass. Whatever else is true, it got really hot in here.” She pointed to a spot on the ground, where there were more granules of metal, and there were places where molten metal had pooled and filled in divots in the ground, and ran in runnels across the floor, like melted wax. “I’d bet it had something to do with those.”

Neela and Meria looked at each other. Meria said, “But—whoever built this place, they built the space installations, too. And yet, you say something more powerful, more advanced, wiped them out? Something beyond even their understanding?”

“That’s precisely what I’m saying,” Liss said. 

Essa got to her feet, and hoping to avoid the conversation boiling over into some kind of argument, she said, “Let’s move. We’ve been sitting here long enough. Meria, you come with me. Liss, you’re with Neela. I want to search the area, to see if there’s anything we can use. Circle back and meet where we came in. Use the comms if you get into trouble.”

They went their separate ways, though it didn’t look as though they would find anything useful on their way. Whatever had broken through the roof had burned or melted just about everything it had touched. Essa had stooped over to inspect a pile of debris that contained something that looked ceramic pottery, when Meria said, “Hey. I think I saw something.” Essa stood up and looked around. Meria was standing not far away and pointing toward the edge of the cavern, where one of the spillways emptied into the cavern. “Look,” Meria said. “Right there, along the wall.”

They walked closer. At first it seemed like a group of people were standing against the far wall, then it looked as though they were looking at a painting of creatures roughly the same size and shape as asari, arrayed against the wall. Coming close, they saw they were shadows. 

“I’ve heard of this happening,” Meria said. “If a blast is hot enough, it can vaporize a body and leave a shadow on the wall.”

Essa nodded. She’d heard similar stories, from the war. That had been a long time ago. She reached out and touched the silhouette that seemed to be baked into the surface of the rock. Its shape was indistinct enough that it could have been an asari, though it seemed somewhat broader in build, perhaps somewhat more muscular. 

“This is all that’s left of them,” Meria said. “We should leave. This place is a tomb.”

“Agreed,” Essa said. Just then she saw something move. Turning she saw it again, more distinctly this time, something that looked like a green fog, rising up through the mist of a nearby spillway. 

She signaled to Meria, who followed her. “I hope you don’t believe in ghosts.”

“After everything we’ve seen in the last two weeks,” Meria said, “I’d be happy if that’s all it was.”

Getting closer to the spillway didn’t make the disturbance any clearer. The green fog just floated there in the mist. 

As they drew closer, Meria said, “I wonder where the water goes after this. You’d think this place would have filled up ages ago.”

“Must be a drain,” Essa said. “Somewhere.”

They were standing in front of the green fog now. It flickered up through the pale mist. Essa reached out to touch it, and as she did, its color changed briefly, then it seemed to resolve itself into a shape with limbs and a head, though still indistinct. The shape held out its arms, and Essa, reached out as well, her hands touching something made of metal hidden behind the curtain of falling water. 

The next thing she knew, she was on the floor, her back soaked and cold. She was shivering Her wrist tool pipping and indicating that her heart rate and other vital signs were normal. Neela was hovering over her, whispering something. It was only a moment later that Essa realized Neela had been shouting. 

“There you are,” Neela said. “We thought you’d been electrocuted.”

Essa blinked. She saw an image flicker across her vision, the shape of a creature running, running in fact from right over there, at the center of the cavern, through a city filled with narrow streets, indistinct faces huddled at windows and doorways, looking up at the ceiling of the cavern, then shielding their faces as a pair of hands stretched out to touch a little piece of metal before disappearing in a flash of light. Essa was, she realized, reliving some poor creature’s last memory, though how she came by it, she wasn’t sure. She got up and got to her feet. It was strange. She’d been unconscious, but she felt fine. 

“How long was I out?” she said. 

“A few minutes,” Neela said. “Long enough for us to get over here from all the way over there.” She indicated the spot where she and Liss had been foraging. 

Essa walked back to the wall, where she had touched something behind the curtain of water. There was something hidden just behind it, almost jutting through the surface of the current. She reached out carefully, and before Liss could pull her away, her hand seized a small rectangular piece of metal that had been thrust into the wall. As she touched it, the green light it gave off gradually flickered and died. 

“Is that what you touched?” Neela said. 

Essa nodded. “I think it’s broken,” she said. 

Neela came over to her and carefully took it away, then placed it in a sample bag for transport back to the ship. “Maybe you shorted it out,” she said. “I bet we can fix it.”

“Maybe let’s not mess around with any more alien technology for a while,” Meria said. 

The light was fading, and they needed to return to their camp. It was dusk by the time they were aboveground again, and as they crossed through the forest, the stars came out. The day had grown progressively warmer as the day wore on. No one at camp or anywhere else had anything of interest to report, except that Orie had found a tree with some familiar looking berries growing on it, and wanted to show the samples she’d taken to Neela. The Nixia radioed on its next pass overhead that all was well in low planetary orbit. 

But the forest was quiet. There were no animal sounds, and aside from the vague swaying of leaves on trees the uninhabited forest became terrifying, as though a silent killer was stalking them from the shadows. From time to time, Liss let out a long Whoop! Just for the sake of not feeling alone. 

They were almost back at camp when something strange happened. From behind them a flaming object came roaring overhead, followed by a sonic boom so loud and close by that it nearly knocked them off their feet. A few seconds later the terrible thud of the object hitting the ground shook them again, and in the distance an enormous lick of flame appeared among the trees. There was another loud crack. Someone, somewhere was crying out for help. Essa demanded a status report.

“All accounted for, Captain,” Arana said. “We can hear someone calling out, though. Are any of you hurt?”

“Negative,” Essa said. “It’s not us.”

 

There was a pause, and above the static, Essa heard the voice cry out again. Essa radioed Arana to put together a team to go investigate. “We’ll be right there,” she said. 

Essa and the others were preparing to move, when Neela said, “Goddess, if it’s not one of us, then who could it be?”


	16. Little Wing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Liara discovers some new data in Benezia's old files.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I just wanted to encourage anyone who would like to comment to please do so, even if all you have to say is that this isn't your kind of thing. I'm interested no matter what.

Little Wing 

The quarian survived long enough to make it to the hospital. Liara wasn’t yet willing to call the broken body that she delivered, three days after Esan, to the trauma surgeons at Huerta Memorial by her given name of Ashana nar Vesta. 

An ambulance met them at the docks. So much for an inconspicuous arrival. Liara followed in a car piloted by Alera, then made sure guards were posted, after speaking to the salarian doctor, who showed little emotion, but was not at all optimistic about the outcome. 

Her geth symbiotes had not returned from the collective. Liara suspected that they would not, having escaped to safety.

“You need not stay,” he said. “It will be a while before we know anything for certain.”

Varian protested, and sat down in the lounge. Liara left him there, on one of the benches that looked out over the Presidium. The twenty-hour cycle was changing over from evening to night. The air traffic had thinned out, and most of the embassies down below were dimming their lights as their employees left for the day. Liara tried one last time to get Varian to come with her.

“We have a comfortable place for you to sleep,” she said. “Come with us.”

“Here’s fine,” he said, tugging at the sleeves of his ill-fitting jacket. 

Liara said, “I’ll have someone bring you some food and a change of clothing.” Varian only looked up at her. “Would you like me to prepare travel documents for you? A new identity? You can’t go back to Omega, but you might be able to start a new life somewhere else. Maybe even Palaven.”

Varian shook his head. “Have you been to Palaven?”

“Of course,” Liara said. It had been a while, but Cipritine, nearly two hundred years later, still bore scars of the war. The Hierarchy had decided to leave many ruins standing, as a monument and as a reminder. The turian economy had recovered somewhat, but much of that recovery was based on massive military spending, of orbital defenses and shipyards. They were currently building seven new dreadnoughts. There was work for a young man like Varian, though for the unskilled, orbital work was hard, the pay for the unskilled was poor, and there were many risks. Likely he would end up in the Terminus systems, with some local crime organization. In ten years, he’d be a kingpin or—much more likely— dead. Either way, he would be off her hands. 

Varian sighed, and said, “Then, you’d know better than to suggest I go back.”

Back? She hadn’t suggested that he return. She made a note of looking into that, and patted him on the shoulder. “The offer stands.”

Varian thought a moment, his mandibles flexing in the glare of the hospital lights. “I appreciate it, but I don’t know what I want to do.”

“We’ll look in on you in the morning,” Liara said, and left him sitting there. When they were in the elevator. “Have someone keep an eye on him,” she said to Alera.   
#  
Back at her apartment, Liara was standing by the windows, but not looking out. Aria couldn’t reach this far, she thought, but wondered if that was really true. The two of them were nothing alike, and yet Liara sensed the differences between them were growing smaller. Liara had become cold, calculating, controlling, and closed off from the exterior world. Paranoid. Not without reason, but all the same, consumed with outmaneuvering an unseen, but unrelenting enemy, one who would only continue pursuing her until—one way or another—she died. That was no way to live. 

Leave those thoughts for later. “Alera,” Liara said, “If you don’t mind, I’d like to speak with Gell vas Mesto, and the Councilor.”

“Face to face?” Alera said. Liara nodded. “Could take a while,” she said. 

“I’ll be in the lab,” she said. “And keep me posted about the quarian.”  
#  
She tried entering the encryption key she’d picked up on Esan into the data drives, though it wasn’t immediately clear whether there were any hidden, or additional files. Likely Benezia had stashed her important files elsewhere, somewhere within the treasure trove of data that Liara had inherited—still encrypted, and thus inaccessible—after her mother’s death. Even two hundred years later, she still didn’t know what those files contained, and over the decades her attempts to hack the cloud-stored files had become more and more halfhearted. Now, though, well this was something. She started a program that would test the key against the rest of Benezia’s data. Perhaps there was something there. Only searching would take a while. Hours at least, perhaps days. Liara went to the small office she kept next to the lab. 

Liara, in an attempt to keep up the impression that she had, in fact, returned to academia, had published a number of books since the end of the reaper invasion, the first being a detailed account of the discovery of Javik on Eden Prime, and her travels with him during the war, followed by a second book of interviews with him, regarding the structure of prothean civilization. Waking Vengeance, and The Dead Empire had both been hugely successful. If Liara hadn’t already had the resources of the Shadow Broker at her disposal, it would have made her rich enough to retire. At least, though, now she had a means of explaining away some of the money she did spend on things like this lavish apartment on the Citadel. 

In the wake of that first success, she and Javik had traveled to dozens of other sites, revisiting old research and old dig sites with a fresh perspective. 

Of course, Javik only had his memory to rely on, and he had spent nearly a hundred years—all of his adult life—at war. Virtually everywhere he’d gone, the invasion had already come, or was about to arrive, or had come and gone, leaving only destruction in its wake. The worst, Javik had said, had been the few times he’d arrived on a world in advance of an attack, during the evacuations, those brief intervals where it was still safe for refugees to get off-world. Certainly, he’d always been busy organizing planetary defenses, but everywhere he looked, there were panicked faces, civilians, children. When he talked about such times, Liara watched him rubbing his hands together, as though he were trying to wipe away the memory. He had failed every last one of them, he said. Every single being that had looked to him, prothean, or client race, citizen or slave, they had all eventually been swept up in the destruction. Here he was, the only one to remember them. 

Eventually, Liara had been able to convince Javik to take some of the money they’d earned, and to abandon his plans of returning to the Kronian Nebula, where he’d once intended to cut his own throat at the burial place of his former crew. Even so, he’d refused to stay on the Citadel, claiming it was too noisy. Instead he’d retreated to a virtually uninhabited garden world, beyond Citadel space, where he had scuttled his ship, and hacked out an existence for himself in the trackless forest. Now he grew his own food, hunted, and no longer wore the armor that had burdened him for so long. He’d grown old, and in his old age had developed a limp. A prothean, he said, could live some four hundred cycles, though he’d never seen it happen in his lifetime. Now he would attempt to last that long. 

Over time, his anger had eventually become something like acceptance. He said the solitude helped. He saw few from the outside world, but all the same, whenever Liara visited, which was not often, Javik would always smile, and pull down a bottle of something or other that he picked up from the traders who infrequently came his way, and who—not knowing what he was—called him the strange man of the woods. 

For the past eight years she’d been working on a book that dealt with the aftermath of the reaper invasion, beginning during the battle over the ruins of London, and continuing on until present day. Parts of it were straightforward enough. There were plenty of documents leading up to the allied fleet’s final assault. The Normandy’s crash landing and brief stay on a green planet about seven light years from earth. The months and years she’d spent living in the ruins, after her return to earth, and the decades and now centuries after that, as Liara had watched all of the Normandy’s crew eventually fall to illness or old age, or despair, or assassination, or to simply disappear one day, never to be heard from again. Of the old crew, only one other aside from Javik and Liara remained, and like Javik, EDI had gone into seclusion. The two seldom spoke, though Liara knew she was still out there, observing the galaxy with her potent mind. The thought did not give her comfort.

So many questions remained unanswered, and these were holding up progress on the final chapters. For instance, what had happened to Shepard at the end of the battle? Early reports had stated that nearly all the ground forces rushing toward the beam had been wiped out, and the few that remained were in the process of falling back to defensive positions in the ruins well beyond the forward operating base. But then, the Citadel arms had begun to open. 

Comm transcripts showed at least one brief conversation between Shepard and Hackett’s command center, though the Commander seemed to be fading, fumbling for words, as though badly wounded, and then the signal had gone dead. 

But then: a flash of light. The battle ends, and everyone is saved. But where was Shepard’s body? Or Anderson’s? It wasn’t likely that Shepard had been among the tens of thousands of unrecognizable corpses that had remained on the field in London. Or perhaps Shepard was buried under a wall on the Citadel, or possibly out there, somewhere in the Sword cloud, making the close pass to the earth once every year.

No matter: the battle ends. The reapers disengage, some appear to spontaneously self-destruct, while others run, and disappear. Now what? 

On Virmire, Liara had watched Shepard speak to Sovereign. What had it told them all? We bring order to the chaos. Perhaps Shepard had learned for once and for all what that meant. It had never made any sense to Liara. All she knew was that up until two hundred years ago, the reapers had come at regular intervals and wiped out entire civilizaions, leaving ruins and traces for others to find. Their purposes were perhaps unknowable. Any given civilization could only expect to reach a certain level of advancement before they arrived with their unstoppable force. 

Now they were gone, forever so everyone seemed to think, and the new galactic society was free to move on as though nothing had changed, as though the Normandy had never visited Eden Prime, as though Shepard had never touched the prothean beacon and given the galactic civilization its one and only hope of surviving the reapers. 

Heroes, Liara thought, have a way of undoing our need for them. Used up by their own effort, they become a symbol, no longer flesh and blood. For a while they serve as an example, and then, later, they leave us wondering, Can I be brave? And when the answer comes back, No, then we use them as an excuse for our own weakness. I don’t need to be brave, because Shepard was. Now, half the galaxy acted as though it wished it could pretend the year 2183 had never happened. Well, it could, if only evidence to the contrary weren’t everywhere, wreckage, ruins, silence where there had once been a multitude of voices. 

She wondered what would become of the galaxy when she was gone. Her mind often lingered on this particular thought, but at the moment it made her restless. She went back to the lab to see if the encryption key had done its work. 

As a matter of fact, it had. Opening her screen again, Liara saw two small files from the cloud had been accessed and opened for her. The first included several hand drawn diagrams of plants, trees mostly, of a species unfamiliar to her. Whoever had made them, had given particular attention to the leaves, that had thick, red veins running along their undersides. The characters and writing were from an old alphabet, one of the many dialects of the asari language that dated back to before even Matriarch Dillanga’s era, when the asari were still only reaching out to the edges of their solar system. 

The last page of these notes described a plant native to Thessia, a bush that bore plentiful, and nutritious berries, each one about the size of a person’s thumb. Beside this, the artist had scrawled the word, impossible. 

Her mother had added notes of her own to the drawings, though she seemed unable to puzzle out who’d done them, or why a scientist would consider a common plant to be impossible. Liara tried to match the samples from the tree against known plants on Thessia, but found nothing. It was possible it was an extinct species. 

The other file contained only two words. Little Wing, the pet name Benezia had given her, when she was only still a child, knocking together wooden blocks on the floor of her mother’s office. But then Liara saw her mother had added a drawing of a small predatory bird, and that jogged another memory. After a brief search through her records, she found an entry about the Nixia, a small research vessel from the early expansion period. The ship had been sent to recover an FTL probe sent to Orisoni, but had vectored off course to investigate an unidentified sensor contact that had turned out to be the Thessia relay. Three days later the Nixia had vanished for reasons that had never been sufficiently explained. And the following year, after an exhaustive search of the space around the relay, the Research Fleet had held a memorial and declared the ship lost with all hands. There were no additional records pertaining to the ship.

Nixia. Little Wing. There was Benezia, in all her glory, never doing anything without a second purpose. Even Liara’s pet name served its own special function. Only what? 

It seemed like a dead end. But as she worked, her search began returning more files. Dossiers on the ship’s captain, first officer as well as most of its crew, as well as the military records for a commandant of the Serrice Intelligence Division, named Amair Razia, and of another named Nerai Falaran, both of whom were counted among the crew lost aboard the Nixia. 

It took almost no time at all to establish that both Razia and Falaran had been very dangerous people, not the sort that would have been sent along on a research mission, in particular not one that involved something as non-military as recovering the first of several FTL probes launched toward the nearest star systems. 

Reading deeper, Liara saw that Razia had been a breacher, the sort of specialist who didn’t typically live for very long in active combat. She’d been wounded in battle a dozen times, though never badly enough that she couldn’t return to action, and had eventually lasted long enough to command her own unit of operatives, a group that excelled at infiltration and demolition; half of her troops had been experienced combat engineers prior to entering Razia’s unit. She’d fought alongside them for a century, losing fewer than one might have expected. This had been twenty-five hundred years ago, near the end of the final Serrice-Armali conflict. Later she’d gone on to perform high-level intelligence analysis for Serrice High Command. 

And then, at the age of six hundred and seventy-three, Razia had been tasked with forming a special unit. Its mission and purpose had been expunged from the record. Two more of Benezia’s files opened, indicating that someone had destroyed the originals of the documents, and that no copies had survived. 

Liara looked for any transcripts of radio transmissions from the Nixia. What little she found indicated that communications with High Rock had been sparse, though on the day the ship disappeared, there was a brief transmission from the second officer, who had radioed to say there had been a power failure, and that backup systems were coming online. High Rock had radioed that a ship called the Desinna, had been ordered to provide assistance in the emergency. As High Rock was contacting the Desinna, the Nixia had radioed again to say primary power had been restored and their systems were coming back online. But her transmission cut out halfway through, the report noted, in a way that suggested power generators onboard the ship had failed. Infrared observations, however, showed that the ship had executed a burn, and in fact had been vectoring toward the mass relay before it had vanished. The Desinna, arriving on station some ten hours later, found no trace of the ship. 

Later analysis, once the relays’ purpose was better understood, suggested that the Nixia might have collided with the relay while attempting to maneuver in closer, or perhaps been torn apart by strong tidal forces. To Liara, this made no sense. It was not standard protocol to approach an unknown object in a vessel that large. And in any case, records indicated that the Nixia’s first officer had taken a small team to explore the relay the day before, using the ship’s launch. 

A thought occurred to her, that she couldn’t shake: it was possible the Nixia had attempted to interact with the relay, and that the effort had somehow failed, either destroying the ship, and scattering the debris so thoroughly that none of it could be found, or sending the craft somewhere far across the galaxy, with no way to return. 

Liara carried that thought with her as she went upstairs. It was morning again, now. Widow was rising over the trailing edge of Zakera ward, casting the apartment in a short-lived twilight. Alera and Letha were watching a human historical drama, set on earth, well before the discovery of spaceflight: bearded males hacking at each other with swords, large flying reptiles, nude females parading around in ways that Liara found disconcertingly arousing. Alera and Letha were arguing about the content of the program. According to Alera, the flying reptiles were real, but that they had died out well before humans had evolved. Letha was shaking her head. Why then, she wanted to know, were there so many human tales with such creatures in them. Alera turned to Liara for assistance. Liara only shrugged, and sat down at the bar in the kitchen. 

“Any word from the Councilor?” she said. 

Alera shook her head. “She apparently had an ‘appointment’ with the Consort.”

“In that case,” Liara said, “I hope the Matriarch isn’t too depleted from her exertions to speak to us in the morning.” After a moment, Liara said, “And vas Mesto?”

“We have him,” Alera said, somewhat vaguely, though Liara knew exactly where and what that meant. “Let me know what you want done.” After a moment, Alera added, “And about our turian friend—we’ve only got a spotty record from Omega, two separate addresses. No criminal record.”

“On Omega no one bothers,” Liara said. 

“Still, we don’t have a birthplace or date for him. There are only two turian hospitals on Omega. He should have been logged at one of them.”

“Or born at home.”

Alera shrugged. “Or he’s not who he says he is.”

“Well, we never asked him, did we?”

Alera made to get up, but Liara motioned for her to sit. 

Liara stood. “I’ll go to him.” She made for the door, and again told Alera to remain seated. “I’ll go alone. I need to stretch my legs.”

Alera and Letha scowled. Likely they would follow at a distance, in case she got into trouble. Let them. 

She took the lift down to the lobby, some fifty floors below, where the building’s VI already had a cab waiting for her. She keyed in an address and sat back as it merged into the Citadel’s dense morning traffic. 

#

She found Varian slumped in a chair, about half asleep and half watching local news on a video screen projected against one of the pans of the window. He didn’t seem surprised to see her, when Liara put her hand on his shoulder. 

“You’re here,” he said, sounding almost relieved. “Is she—?” 

Liara shook her head. “I’ve only just arrived,” she said. “Let’s go in together.”

They went through the doors to the nurse’s station who in turn paged the doctor. Not much later the same young salarian emerged from behind a set of screens, looking weary after the long operation. Seeing them, he frowned. 

“Are you the ones who brought in the quarian?”

“We are,” Liara said. “Is there a problem?”

“Her symbiotes infected my surgical computer.” He shook his head. “Kept asking to speak to you,” he said. “They had important news, they said.”

“Where are they now?” Liara said. 

“I wouldn’t know, Doctor.”

“And the quarian?”

The salarian lowered his eyes, but said, “She’ll live. That’s all I can promise.” With that, he walked away, leaving Liara and Varian standing there, wondering what that meant. 

“You can see her,” the nurse said. “She’s awake.” Varian took Liara’s hand in his as they went to the door. 

She looked about the same as she had on Liara’s ship, which is to say she seemed like she was dead. One eye was open, and the only indication that she was, in fact, still breathing, was the fact that it blinked slowly as they entered. Varian sat down. The quarian raised the three fingers on her right hand, a wave, or perhaps she was reaching out for comfort.

Varian took her hand in his, and they sat quietly, while Liara went over to the console that was running the life support machines. 

“Are you there?” she said. 

We are. 

“Well?”

You have taken Host vas Mesto into custody, is that correct?

“It is.”

Will you punish him?

“Why would I do that?”

He is not to blame for what happened. 

“Then who is?”

The screen—very briefly—flashed an image of Matriarch Deniri, the asari Counselor, taken from a security camera. Standing in profie beside her was a quarian that Liara recognized as one of the more important members of their community on board the Citadel. The image was relatively small, and had been displayed at an angle that would have made it difficult for anyone but her to see. Even so, Liara looked over her shoulder, wondering if Varian had seen, but he seemed enthralled with Ashana, and the fact that she was going to survive. Liara betrayed no sign of discomfort.

“How do you come by this information?”

The methods we suggested earlier. It is true that Host vas Mesto did provide images and data to the informant. It was not aware of what they were for. 

Liara wanted to ask why the quarian team had been killed on Esan. Perhaps it didn’t matter. “Do you have anything else for me?”

Not at present. We merely wish to thank Dr. T’Soni for saving Host nar Vesta, and thereby Our Collective. We shall now return to Our Host. Again, we thank you, Doctor. We wish to some day be of further use.

Liara nodded and stepped away from the console. She wasn’t sure what this meant. Matriarch Deniri could have leaked the information to the quarians, and sent them searching for Benezia’s mark on Esan. Or, she could have just as easily done so to Aria. Either way, important information was getting out, and Liara decided it might be time to draw the circle closer, and purge her network. 

She stepped over to Ashana’s bed. Best to start using her name, now that she would be responsible for her. Liara placed her hand on the railing of the bed, and tried not to look at the mess of tubes, drains, dressings, or the bruise-black muscle and skin grafts that had been left exposed to the air. “Ashana,” Liara said. “I’m glad to see you’re awake.” 

Ashana looked up at Liara. For a moment she looked frightened, then said, “You carried me.”

“Part of the way,” Liara said. 

“Thank—” she said, before her voice gave out. Her mouth was dry after the surgery. 

“Don’t speak,” Liara said. “Save your strength. You’ll need it.”

Varian looked up at Liara and nodded. To Ashana he said, “Yes, you should rest. I’ll stay with you, while you sleep.”

“Yes,” Liara said, “though, Varian, I’d like to speak with you a moment in the corridor.” Once they were outside the room, Liara lead him into an alcove, and closing the curtain behind them, she said, “Are you aware that you’ve got a tracking device implanted in your flesh?”

Varian nodded. “The needle seemed a little big.”

Liara stared at him hard. “You also had devices in your clothing, and in your weapon.”

“What are you saying?”

“Aria likes to keep tabs, but she doesn’t often use implants. I think it’s time you came clean with me. Who are you?”

Varian shook his head. “Relax,” he said. “We’re all on the same side of this.”

Liara grabbed him by the collar of his tunic, and shoved him against the wall, using the blade of her forearm to choke him. “Tell me who you are, right now. If you lie to me I’ll kill you right here.” Her other hand glowed with blue biotic energy. Varian’s mandibles flicked, but his eyes remained narrow. 

“You wouldn’t.”

Liara only raised her eyebrows. “Last chance.”

Varian hesitated, then said, “Fine! Fine.” Liara let him drop to the floor, and helped him up. “You’re going to have to talk to my boss and tell her why my mission’s blown.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“I’m turian intelligence,” Varian said. “Omega was my first posting.” 

“That’s a tough place to start.”

“Yeah, well, our networks tend not to last long there. They were trying to get me into the hornets. While I was waiting Aria’s organization picked me up for a little plainclothes work here and there. Just to test me out.” Varian rubbed at his throat. A nurse came by and drew the curtain back, but closed it again at a look from Liara. “Day you found me, my turian contact came for what she called a routine medical exam. She planted the tracker. All the other gear came from Aria.”

Liara nodded. “I’ll clear things up with your handler,” she said. Already she had turned away from him, and had opened the curtain again. The corridor was empty and she stepped out into it. 

“That’s it?” Varian said. 

“A doctor will be by to see you shortly. His name’s Mason. He’s going to want to look at your leg. You may also find a little hole in your back, when he’s done. In the meantime, go back to Ashana. She needs looking after.”

Liara walked out onto the Presidium. She wasn’t far from Matriarch Deniri’s offices, but before she could set off in that direction, she found Alera, waiting for her on a park bench bench. Liara sat down beside her. 

“Well?” Alera said. 

“The quarian will live.”

“And?”

“The Concilor has betrayed us. We need to find out why.”


	17. Athame's Chariot

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Nixia's captain investigates the meteorite that crashed near her party's campsite on an uncharted planet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the long delay in updating. I lost an earlier draft of this chapter, and had to begin again. Thanks for reading, and don't hesitate to leave feedback.

Essa was running, low branches whipping over her head, as the forest filled with noise and smoke and fire. All around her debris from the crash struck the ground, and the air was swirling with ash, burning leaves, and smoldering chips of wood. The radio crackled again, this time it was Arana calling to say that she couldn’t locate Orie or Clera, and that no one had seen them in at least half an hour. 

“Were they near the impact?” Essa said. 

“Closer than we are.”

“Understood,” Essa said. “Prepare camp for casualties.” 

“On the double, Captain,” Arana said. 

Essa started running again, and soon had caught up to Liss, who had stopped to remove her pack. “We won’t need these,” she said. She’d been running flat out for three minutes and didn’t even seem winded. Liss sprayed a symbol on a nearby tree with her special paint before they both set out again. The forest was filled with the distant sounds shouting, the rescue team picking their way through the edge of the forest at least a kilometer away. But all around them, nearly total quiet, the silence after a battle, Essa thought, as they made their way into a plain of shattered trees. 

They were close to it now. They had come to the edge of the blast zone. The trees at its edge had had their limbs striped off, and were charred on the sides facing the impact. Another hundred meters closer to the impact, the trees themselves had been sheared off in the blast. As they progressed, the stripped trees gave way to trunks that had been completely snapped in half, and nearer the crater still, nothing but partially unburied roots remained. Through the dust and smoke and cinders in the air, Essa saw the edge of the crater, perhaps five hundred meters away.

Liss had stopped to rinse her mouth and eyes out with water from her pouch. While she was in cover, there was another explosion, smaller, but still Essa felt it thump in her chest. Then another crack, and a horrible roar that made her stop in her tracks. Liss, a pace ahead of her stopped and dove for cover. Essa did the same, though she wasn’t sure what she was hiding from. 

She crawled to where Liss lay in the dirt. “What’s going on?” she said. 

Liss only looked back, her eyes wide, “That isn’t a meteorite,” she said through her teeth. 

What was it, then? Essa wondered. Liss pressed her body into the ground and gestured for Essa to follow. 

They advanced the last hundred meters on their bellies, reaching the edge of the crater, a shallow pit, perhaps less than two hundred meters across, twenty or thirty deep. The air was filled with smoke and things on fire. Down below, through the smoke and fire, she saw a giant black object, shaped like a flattened teardrop. Smoke poured from an opening in its side, and through the smoke, Essa saw a figure stumbling up the slope of the crater, moving toward them. 

“Orie!” she shouted, “Clera!” Essa threw herself into the crater. Liss was calling for her to wait, but then Essa heard her coming up behind her. The shape walking toward them stumbled, fell to its knees and then to the ground, where it lay, face down, unmoving. 

Essa reached it first. The body was asari, tall and broad in the shoulders and hips, and wearing what had been wearing a gray and yellow uniform. Blackened by fire, and peeling away in the back, her body was badly burned. Essa rolled her over; she was still breathing, and let out a moan as Essa moved her. She seemed to reach for Essa’s face, and whispered the word, a friend, in the low coastal dialect, before passing out. 

There was another shout from the other side of the object at the bottom of the crater, a person crying out for help. Essa told Liss to go see what it was. Indicating a spot on the crater rim, she said, “We’ll meet up over there, understood?” Liss nodded and ran off, while Essa heaved the unconscious body over her shoulder. 

Static blasted through the radio. Someone was trying to reach her, but couldn’t get through. The woman she’d picked up let out another sob of pain. Essa needed to move, but something held her there, as though her feet were sinking into the sandy ground at the bottom of the crater. It had gone quiet. There was no longer a sound of debris falling. The fires had gone quiet. The body over her shoulder breathed silently. And in the hush, Essa seemed to hear something like a whisper.

She stepped closer to the object. Its exterior was made of a rust-colored metal, or perhaps metal that had weathered from long exposure to the elements. 

Without needing to think about it, Essa realized that it was a spacecraft. There, the things sticking from its sides were landing legs. An exit hatch had blown open from within, perhaps a safety feature. The square thing lying in the dirt just a dozen meters away must have covered the hole. Thruster vents at the bottom of the ship leaked smoke and a kind of black liquid, and then more smoke bursting forth from the crew compartment. The craft seemed to strain against its landing gear and then let out another howl that shook the ground and made Essa’s vision fill with light. 

The next thing she knew, she was heaving herself over the edge of the crater. Looking back she saw her footprints leading directly from where she’d picked up the body. The woman she’d picked up groaned and seemed to regain consciousness for a moment, then shut her eyes again, her fists clenched shut. 

Liss was almost immediately behind her, breathing hard, and carrying another body slung over her back. This one was bigger: big limbs, big body. Its head bobbed within a large circular collar, and ragged pieces of material hung, almost like strips of fur or long ribbons, from the joints. 

“Who is it?” she said. 

Liss shook her head. “Too big to be Orie,” she said, and adjusted the body into a more comfortable position. “Maybe Clera, but it doesn’t explain her enviro suit.” They clambered up onto the severed trunks and were stepping from fallen tree to fallen tree. It wasn’t the safest way to move, but it was the fastest. 

“The search and rescue team should be that way,” Essa said, and pointed. “We’ll need their help.”

Liss nodded. From the bottom of the crater came more noise, the sound a broken machine trying to function, in spite of itself: groaning metal, gears meshing improperly. Then another roar. Essa and Liss dropped low again, and then there was another rumble, and the ground began to shake. The teardrop shaped object rose from the bottom of the pit on a column of flame and then, leaning slightly in the direction of the mountains it began to climb away, headed toward the upper atmosphere. 

It didn’t get there. Instead, after gaining some altitude and traveling perhaps a dozen kilometers of lateral distance, there came a flash of light, and the little ship began to break into burning pieces that over the next minute or so splashed dabs of fire onto the foothills. 

“The entire mountain range coud be on fire by dawn if it doesn’t rain,” Liss said. 

Essa picked up the radio and called Arana. “We’ve found Orie and Clera,” she said. “Both in critical condition.”

“Neela and Meria have just arrived,” Arana said. There was a pause. Perhaps Arana was checking on something. “Say again, Captain. Two, critical?”

“Yes,” Essa said. 

A burst of static came over the radio, and then Arana said, “I’m sending the search team in your direction. Five minutes.”

Off in the distance a sizable section of the horizon had already turned orange, and a tower of smoke rose, bent eastward by the prevailing winds that rolled down off the mountains. 

They reached the search party soon after, and things progressed much more quickly now that there were half a dozen people to share the load. Liss mentioned the packs that she and Essa had set down in the forest.

“We’ll go back for them in the morning,” Essa said. “I don’t think anyone’s going to take them.”

Liss nodded. When they reached the camp, Neela hurried away with the two patients, and Essa went to wash the blood and bits of burnt flesh off her hands. They shook as she scrubbed, and not from the chill in the air. 

#

Everything in camp seemed to be in order. Everyone was doing their jobs efficiently. No one was simply standing around waiting for orders to come down. Meria was monitoring the radio. They had not tracked any incoming contacts before the impact. 

“It was small,” Meria said. “Maybe it escaped detection before slipping around to the dayside of the planet.”

Essa gave orders for the sensors operator to review the logs, and report in on the next overflight before moving on.

Orie had distilled a full three tons of water and pumped it into the shuttle’s central fuel tank, which they’d left empty just for this purpose. It would be enough to last for months, if they needed it. And if they took any more the might go over their maximum takeoff weight. The science team had identified several plants that might serve as a food source, provided they could be found in any quantity. At least one of them, a kind of berry, dark red and the size of her thumb, looked to be plentiful. The commandos had gone around the camp, securing equipment and assessing damage. They’d pulled in some of the gear that was distributed around the camp, in case they decided to make a swift departure. It appeared as though the launch had not sustained much harm from falling debris.

Once Essa had made her survey, Arana appeared, as though she’d been waiting for the right moment to approach. 

“Captain,” she said, sounding tentative. “Neela’s ready to talk to you.”

Essa waited. “Is there something else?” she said, when Arana wasn’t forthcoming.

“We found Orie,” Arana said. When Essa raised her eyebrows, Arana added, “She’s fine. She was tending to Clera, who seems to have injured her ankle. Their radio was damaged, and it took them a while to return to camp.”

“I see,” Essa said, though only because she didn’t want to ask the obvious question. 

At the medical station, Liss came bounding over to her. “Captain, you have to see this.” She brought Essa over to the first body that lay on its stomach, alive, breathing, badly burned across her back, buttocks and the upper parts of her thighs. Her arms and legs and the unharmed portions of her back, were tattooed extensively, though not in a coherent way. Spacers, like their sailor counterparts before them, liked to acquire marks from the places they’d been. Essa knew, had guessed even as she’d gathered the woman’s nearly lifeless body onto her shoulder, that she wasn’t one of theirs. Liss held the scrap of uniform in her hand, and it trembled as she raised the fabric for Essa to examine under the lights. “Do you know what this is?” she said. 

Essa looked. Despite the charring, it was unmistakable, the black and yellow of the merchant fleet. Among other things they were responsible for transporting supplies to the Athame and Janiri orbital stations. Dangerous work. Every so often one of their ships would go missing. 

She looked at Liss, then at Neela who had come to stand beside her. “This isn’t possible,” she said. 

Neela had no words, and Liss only blinked at her in the harsh lighting of the medical station. “Come with me,” she said, and reached for the Essa’s elbow before withdrawing her hand. 

There was the second body, less hurt than the other. She, too, lay naked under the bright lamps, while crew members sprayed cold water onto her burns. Essa bent low over the body, looking at her face. She knew this one. This one had bloodied Essa’s lip with her elbow and then the butt of her weapon a few short weeks ago. 

The woman’s eyes flickered open, and she said the word Captain, before she passed out. Essa stood and looked from Neela to Liss and back. 

“It can’t be,” she said. 

“But it is,” Neela answered. “It’s Nerai.”

#

Athame’s chariot, so it said in the oldest passages of the Codex, split the heavens open with a bright flame, shook the earth, and even made the unmoving stars in the night’s black ocean seem to tremble. In Serrice, where the goddess counted as more vengeful than tolerant, events that seemed to presage the arrival of her chariot were always seen as bad omens. Even now, things like comets and meteor showers counted as bad luck. In other parts of Thessia, in particular in Armali and in the coastal republics to the south, the chariot could mean many things, not merely famine, war, or some other calamity. There, Athame was a teacher, as were her companions, who brought seeds, and animal husbandry, understanding of the heavens’ clockwork, and in some cases, a sense of mischief and delight. That was Lothe’s work, the joyful chaos. 

Of course it wasn’t easy to reconcile the various interpretations of the different traditions of Athame. Wars had been fought over how one read the books, over the millennia since she’d stopped walking amongst her subjects. Even now debate raged over the avenging goddess, who had leveled cities, and the just and patient one, who taught the people to raise their voices in song. No one could agree, even, on which of the two parts of the Codex came first, because the oldest surviving volume, some forty-five thousand years old, was still only a copy, beautifully illustrated, and inscribed in a convent in one of the coastal republics, its contents determined by a council of learned scholars and theologians, who had decided what to include and what to leave out. 

And there was much that they had omitted from the story. Most importantly, the story of Athame’s departure from the world is not explained in the Codex itself, but in another writing, also quite old. It was not a part of official scripture, and had no official title; not many lifetimes ago, asari had burned each other, just for reading it. Things were different now, and Essa remembered having studied the text a number of times over the course of her education, each time seeing it a different way. Athame, so the story went, had been gone from the world for a long while, perhaps almost an entire lifetime. One day she returned, only she did not come in her chariot, a miracle wrapped in terror, but instead had simply emerged from the edge of the forest, walking down a nameless road, into a nameless village, where she quietly joined a group of others, sitting around the fountain, watching the children play, and their mothers gather water for the washing. She decided to wait some hours to reveal herself to the people, and in waiting, one of the younger girls recognized her for what she was. Athame held out her hands, and the child came to her. The mothers saw and understood who had come, and began preparing a feast, though it was early spring, and the reserves of food that remained in the village were all but depleted. By and by a group of huntresses returned from a long expedition into the forest, empty handed, alas, but for a few small creatures they’d taken with their bows. They, too, saw the goddess in the village square, and began dressing their kill to add to the feast. Athame joined their feast, but refused to take anything but water. When everyone but the goddess had eaten their fill, Athame went to each family and spoke a few words. What she said is not for us to know. Then she gathered the people together in the village square and said to them: “When we are children, our mothers appear to live forever. When we are grown, we come to understand that it is not so. In time, after the sadness is gone, we remember. Only when we remember, sometimes we see the lessons of the past in a new light. To remember is to understand, to understand again what we thought we once knew for certain. I now ask this of you. Remember me and what I have taught you. In the years to come, my lessons may take on a new meaning. As for me, it is time that I travel elsewhere, below or above, I do not yet know. Even a goddess must face her end. I hope to meet mine with grace.” When she had finished, she handed a bauble to the village matriarch, a bead of metal, cut and grooved, like a key. The goddess told her to keep it safe. And then, quietly as she had come, she rose and left the village, disappearing where the road crossed over again into the forest, never to return. 

It is said that in the late evening, just before sunset, one can sometimes meet a strange traveler, passing from light into darkness. When you see her, offer her water, and your luck will turn for the better. The shadows cast by trees at the edge of a forest are still known as Athame’s twilight. 

#

Whether the story was true or not, there was a real bauble, more or less as described in the tale. Essa had seen it once in Armali in the great temple of Athame, where it was kept on display in a glass box. The faithful stood in line for hours just to walk past it and the many other relics kept there. Even so, Essa always thought it was just a story. Now, as a new day dawned under heavy rain, she wondered what to believe. 

Over the long night, word had spread of Nerai’s return. And as the night wore on, unease spread throughout the camp as to what it meant. Nerai had been sent back to them. In a ship that had, apparently, gone undetected by the Nixia, and whose presence could not be otherwise explained. As much as her comrades loved her, it wasn’t natural. It wasn’t even possible. In spite of the unease, half of the crew, desperate for their first bath in months stripped and began to wash in the warm rain, when day finally broke.

The falling water pulled the ash from the air, and extinguished most of the fires. Essa and Liss made plans to return to the forest to claim the packs they’d left. 

At the aid station, Neela had rolled the unidentified body onto her back. Essa didn’t know her face, but the tattoos looked familiar. There was a shop on High Rock that catered to those whose feet were no longer accustomed to planetary gravity, as there were at the terminals of all the space elevators and asteroid supply depots. 

Neela pointed to the woman’s arm, where she’d inked in the names of the ships she’d served on. There were half a dozen. She was no raw recruit. Starting at the top and moving down, the last ship was listed as the Derin City Star. Essa recognized the name. A large vessel, three or four times the size of the Nixia; it made the Thessia-High Rock-Janiri supply run four or five times a year. It wasn’t a glamorous job, but it was important. The Drerin City Star had been listed as missing, after reporting major thruster failure while aero-braking in Janiri’s upper atmosphere. It had been presumed lost, and subsequent scans of the area had turned up no wreckage or escape vehicles. This was a recent event, one that had happened during the Nixia’s outbound trip to Tevura. They hadn’t been close enough to divert and provide assistance, but they’d heard the distress calls, and some of the follow-up chatter. This woman had been missing, presumed dead for well on two months, and yet somehow, she and Nerai, who had suffered a similar fate, had been—what? scooped up by a passing ship and sent along after the Nixia to another star system a thousand light years away from home? Too many questions with no way to answer them. 

Liss was waiting nearby, ready to go claim her pack again. To Neela, Essa said, “Can they spare you? It might be worth the trouble of checking out the crater in the daylight.”

Neela looked over her shoulder. “They’re both sedated. We’re going to try to wake Nerai later today. The other one. I don’t know, she might not.”

“Come,” Essa said. “We won’t be long.”

It took an hour to find their packs, and another half an hour to reach the crater. The devastation was more obvious in the daylight. The crash had cut a hole in the trees a kilometer wide and perhaps as many as two kilometers long. Essa couldn’t fathom how quickly she’d crossed it at night, running over the jagged stumps that were still burning. One wrong step could have ended with a spear-sharp branch in her belly. 

Now there were still smoldering coals here and there, but the fires were out, leaving blackened trunks and ash that was steadily mixing into the mud. 

Liss climbed up onto one of the taller stumps to survey the damage. “Ever seen anything like this?” she said. 

“Never,” Essa answered. 

“I have,” Liss said. Essa had somehow expected her to say something like this. “Only instead of trees, it was houses. Bodies everywhere. Families. Children.” Essa only shook her head, refusing to take the bait. “I’d never thought bombs could do what they did there.” Liss looked up, as though searching for something. “Not my work,” she said. “Not directly, though we were the ones called the airstrikes in, Razia and I. She spotted, I talked to the pilots. Nasty business.”

“Did you have a point?” Neela said.

Liss shook her head. “I wish I did. I think you’ll find there’s no point to warfare, no matter how they try to tell you there is.”

They found the crater, its edges already slumping inward as the rain tore away at it. The bottom of the pit was waist deep in muddy water, but scattered around the slope, above the water line, were two metal rectangles, each about the size of a body, along with other scraps and shards of similar material. Essa and Neela climbed down to see what they could find. 

“It’s definitely artificial,” Neela said, picking up something that looked like a rivet. It was about as long as her hand. She’d found it next to the metal door. Liss had pulled over a long branch and was using it to prod underneath the surface of the water. 

“There’s more down here,” she said. “Feels heavy.”

“Leave it,” Essa said. “Is there anything we can use?”

Neela shrugged. “Help me turn this over,” she said, pointing at the metal door. It had a narrow slit in it at about eye level, a viewport, covered with a very hard, but clear, material. There were no markings on the concave side of the door, and the exterior seemed similarly featureless. Neela was snapping dozens of images, while Liss continued to fish under the water. 

“Captain,” she said, “If I might have a hand.” Essa went over to her. Liss handed her the stick, then said, “Hold this end, just in case.” Essa did as Liss asked, and watched her easing down into the water, eventually slipping beneath the surface. She was gone for a good long time before she gave a tug on the stick and Essa pulled. Liss still didn’t return right away, but instead one of her hands broke the surface and began thrashing wildly, as though she’d become tangled. 

Essa shouted, “Neela! Help me!”

The two of them ran into the pool, feeling beneath the surface for Liss. After a moment Essa’s arm closed around her body, and grasping under her arms, pulled her up, where the commando struggled to the shallow water, and began gagging and spluttering. Something had risen to the surface with her, an object that looked to be about as long as a coffin. Its lid was the same size and shape as the door they’d found up crater’s side. The three of them pulled it clear of the water, and looked in through the viewport. 

“I can’t see anything inside,” Neela said. “Any idea how to get it open?”

The three of them began feeling around the edges, but the object seemed to be perfectly sealed. They prodded it a while longer, nearly giving up, until Neela’s hand seemed to brush something the right way, and the box gave off a shrill sound that made them all shrink away. Good thing, too, because with a loud crack, the lid shot a dozen meters into the air, landing with a thud some distance up the crater’s side. 

Inside the box was another creature, ancient, mummified, and packed in a gel like material. It might have been an asari, though the skin color was hard to judge. Its skin was drawn taut over the bones in its face and hands, the lips pulled back, the eyes pulled open, and the nose sunken into the creature’s face. Otherwise the creature was naked, with no visible markings on its flesh. Neela had reached into the goo and pulled its head free. There were the characteristic neural tentacles protruding from the back of the creature’s head.

“She’s one of us,” Neela said. 

“Any idea how long she’s been dead?” Essa asked.   “Mummified,” Neela said. “No real way to tell by the usual means.” Gathering a syringe from a pouch on her belt, she said, “I’ll take a sample. Maybe we can analyze it when get back to the ship.”

Liss was scanning the edge of the crater, as though she expected to see something looking down at them. “That thing we saw,” she said. “I wonder how many more it had on it.”

Essa turned to look up toward the foothills of the tall mountains, where some of the larger fires were still burning. “I don’t think we’ll ever know.”

“We should get back to camp,” Neela said. “After we bury this one.”

Liss dug a hole, not that deep. She looked like she was in a hurry. And once the body was in, they all quickly scraped dirt over it. Exposed to the air, the corpse was already starting to show signs of decomposition. They returned to camp without speaking, and the rest of the day progressed as normal. 

Orie had found that on the far side of the pond where she was gathering water, there were several hectares of a bush that bore berries. “They’re like gum berries on Thessia,” she said, popping one into her mouth. Essa tried to stop her, saying Neela hadn’t had a chance to check them first. “I’ve been eating them all day, Captain. I think I’d be dead by now if they were poisonous, don’t you?”

“You must be hungry.”

Orie smiled. “Here,” she said, holding out her hands, “have some.”

Essa pocketed them, and soon enough was chewing on one, tough and starchy, though the longer she chewed, the sweeter it became. Before long her pocket was empty. It was dusk again, though it was hard to tell, given how hard the rain was coming down. 

The radio crackled, and Essa returned from making her rounds to the command post, where Neela had come to find her. 

“The sailor’s coming out of sedation,” she said. “This might be our only chance to speak to her.” 

They hurried back to the aid station, where the sailor’s body was wrapped up in reflective blankets, and burn bandages. Bags of fluid were attached to her arms. Her eyes were puffy and swollen shut, her lips cracked and flaking. She squinted out at Essa and Neela, and mouthed the word, Friends?

Essa took her hand, and said, “Little sister, what is your name?”

“Denni,” she said. She smiled and closed her eyes again, then seemed to snap awake. Breathing hard, she said, “Where are the others?”

“From your ship?” Essa said. “We haven’t found anyone but—“

Denni sat up and took hold of both of Essa’s arms, “Not from my ship,” she hissed. “The others. From the ship? From the—“ she groaned and slumped backward.

Neela said, “The one that brought you—that brought you here?” 

Denni nodded, then groaned. She’d shut her eyes again, and said, “I wasn’t alone.”

“We found one other on the ship with you,” Essa said. “And a mummified corpse in a stasis pod.” 

“Not just one,” Denni said. “There were dozens of us.” She repeated the word, then shut her eyes again, clenched her fists, and whispered, “Not just sisters. A goddess lived there. We were never alone.” Finally she whispered again the single word, “Dozens.” Her fists let go of Essa’s uniform, and her eyelids relaxed, revealing the whites of her eyes. She was gone.

Essa shrunk away, wiping her hands on the legs of her uniform. Neela said, “The infection took her. It was in her too deep to fight it off with what we’ve got here.”

Essa stood, looking around her. Everyone was looking to her for something. “Your orders, captain?” Liss said. 

Essa waited a moment to speak, then said, “Bury this woman.” After a moment she said, “Gather teams. We’re going to collect as many of Orie’s berries as we can by daybreak. This place is nothing but a tomb. We’re leaving.”


	18. Pirin

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Liara goes to Pirin, in an effort to appear loyal to the asari Councilor.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many thanks to RheasHelm over at fanfic.net, who edited this with a very careful eye.

Pirin

If Liara wanted an answer, though, as to why the Councilor had betrayed her, she would have to play the role of loyal servant. Word had come down, a few hours after her visit with Ashana, that the situation on Pirin had taken a strange turn. The Council was sending her to investigate, though Mariselle Cooley, the human representative protested council involvement. The Council had noted her protest, and proceeded to send Liara on her way.

Later, as she was leaning on the counter in the galley aboard her ship, Varian asked, "Do you think they're trying to get you out of the way?”

Liara had been lost in thought, chewing on the rim of her coffee cup. "I think we have to assume that might be their plan.”

"To what end?" he said. Varian was sitting at the table that folded into the wall, and was playing a game of cards against himself. Tall creatures, such as he, didn't always take to life aboard ship. He drew three more cards.

"I gather they'll attempt to search my apartment. Either to plant evidence, or listening devices, or take some important files I keep there.”

"And yet you seem calm.”

"The files aren't there. I've already moved them to another terminal.”

"Whatever that means," Varian said.

"Yes. Whatever that means.”

Varian drew more cards. "Did you speak with my handler?”

"I did," Liara said.

"And? What did she say?”

"She was rather upset to learn that you'd been killed." Varian looked up, his mandibles flaring in surprise. "A terrible accident.” Liara leaned forward, looking intently at Varian. "A head-on collision, over Zakera. No one else was hurt, unless you count the VI that was piloting the delivery truck that crossed your path. I never should have sent you on that errand." Liara paused. "She, of course, asked for some sort of proof. Appropriate samples have been submitted for her review. The body is being cremated at a local mortuary for return to your family, if you have any. Do you?”

Varian nodded. “Parents are dead. I’ve got two sisters. They'll appreciate the gesture.”

"You can never contact them again," Liara said. "For their safety as much as yours. You understand that, don't you?”

Varian nodded and gathered up the cards. "Leave it to humans to invent a game where you play against yourself." He began dealing a new hand, and then asked, "So what happens to me now?”

"My original offer, if I remember correctly, was to give you a new identity. It still stands, though now it comes with a price, while before it would have cost you nothing. You'll be working for me.”

"For free?”

"Well, turian corpses, especially ones of your size, age, and gender, aren't always cheap to come by.”

Varian looked down at the table. "For how long?”

"Until I tell you we're done.”

"Forever, then.”

"It's possible," Liara said. "Anything is possible."  
#

In about a day, they'd arrived at Pirin. Since Arclight's transmission, the situation there had progressed from local unrest to shooting war. Meanwhile, strange things were happening. The colonists who had stormed the port facilities Arclight and his team were defending had boarded surface ships and forced their crews to put out to sea, sometimes in vessels that had not yet taken on fuel. A few of them had been found adrift, while others were steaming for deep water beyond the main continental shelf. Which didn't make any sense to Liara. The colonists had been infected with some kind of parasite; wasn't it the parasite's job to infect more hosts? Many ships had been located, running at top speed, but empty of passengers and crew, though sizable bloodstains on the decks, and in the ships' interiors suggested what had happened. Others were found with people aboard, though they had refused to be taken alive, and either fought back using whatever means they had, or scuttled their ships, in more than one instance, taking with them the boarding parties the Alliance had sent.

Now the Alliance had pulled back, and a rear admiral was directing operations from a command center aboard a cruiser, the Kyoto, parked in geostationary orbit. Liara was obliged to dock, and transfer to a shuttle for transport to the surface. On the way to her shuttle, Admiral Wallis sent an aide to bring her to the command center. Wallis looked like he'd already been beaten, standing hunched over the holographic display of the planet that showed a concentration of surface ships, all marked in red, grouped around a central location that on closer inspection turned out to be the deep water anchor for the space elevator, still under construction. The ship's VI was attempting to work out a firing solution that would not involve damaging the anchor or the aerostat platform that hovered about five kilometers above. It appeared that the platform was where the real action was happening.

"Admiral," Liara said, when Wallis didn't turn to greet her right away. "I've been sent—"  
"Yes, yes," Wallis straightened and turned to face her. He was about fifty, balding, and not wearing his cap. His uniform jacket was unbuttoned. Everyone else in the CIC looked similarly disheveled. "The Council sent you. You'll thank them for me, when you return to the Citadel." Liara came over to the display for a closer look.

"I count over thirty vessels, Admiral. They can't all be from the port of Arras.”

"They're not," he said. "These are what's left of the ships that were at sea, when we arrived in system.”

"What's left?”

"I'm sure by now you've heard what's been happening." Wallis had a wild look in his eyes. Liara wondered whether he'd been drinking. "We found half a dozen empty boats," he said. "Blood all over the decks, in the cabins. No bodies, mind you, just blood. And these weird symbols scrawled everywhere. Again, in blood. That was five days ago, when we first got here." He pushed a few buttons, and the display started showing grainy video. Liara noted the symbols, but they didn't mean anything in particular to her. Wallis went on, "Next few ships we boarded had people on them. Only they weren't acting right. Attacked my men, and then tried to sink their own ships, when they couldn't fight us off. We lost seven men that way. Had to kill a bunch of them, too. Five or six more of my men have come down with the bugs they were carrying. Had to leave them quarantined.”

"Where?"

"One of the boats down there. Captain said he'd be willing to take them."

"So why are the remaining ships here?"

Wallis shook his head. "We had to resort to orbital strikes on the next few ships that had potentially infected passengers. The ones you see on the screen, they were all within a few hundred kilometers of the anchor point when we arrived. They were smart: they're close enough to it now that we can't risk shooting them from up here without damaging the structure, or the platform."

"So what's your plan?"

Wallis looked up at her. "My orders are to contain the situation, but it's been a goat fuck from the start. Only thing we can do right now is maintain interdiction. Any of those ships break formation, we'll shoot 'em. Anyone tries to leave the surface in a shuttle, we'll shoot 'em down. But I've got bigger problems. Right now, we're trying to keep the colonists from taking the platform. Whatever they've got, drives 'em nuts after a while, as you can see. But first they get crazy smart. I don't recommend you go down there. The people of Pirin have a lot of fight in them. And guns. Apparently one of the boats was shipping hundreds of assault rifles to the Arras militia, when this crisis hit. Just our luck."

Wallis looked like the sort of man who often encountered runs of bad luck. Liara wondered how he'd been fortunate enough to rise as high as flag officer. She noted his name, and dialed it in to her omnitool to see if anything came up, when he wasn't looking.

Liara asked the admiral why they'd been sent. The question didn't seem to surprise him. "We were the only ship nearby," he said. "Alliance doesn't usually patrol this deep into the Traverse, not unless we have to. We'd stopped at Ontarom to refuel when we got our orders. And of course, we've got two platoons of shipboard force recon marines. Or at lest we had two platoons. Between the initial engagements and attacks on the platform, we're down to half that. Troop carrier's coming with a battalion in a few days. Likely the anchor won't hold that long. This isn't an operation that's well suited to special operations troops, as you'll see. We need numbers, not skill."

"I'm surprised you're letting me go down," Liara said.

The admiral shook his head. "Once you're off my ship, whatever happens is your problem. Out here the Council and their fact-finders—well, you'll find your facts, one way or another. Just hope you live long enough to make your report. Don't expect me to pass along your messages for you."

Liara let him know that she understood, then returned to the shuttle bay, where Varian was waiting for her with Alera. Before they boarded the shuttle, a lieutenant from the quartermaster corps met them on deck, and handed each breather gear for the altitude and what she referred to as a sidearm.

Once they were strapped in on the shuttle, and their weapons stowed, Varian muttered, "That's the first time I've heard someone call a carbine a sidearm."

"Same here," Alera said. Liara checked hers. It was brand new, with a multi-functional scope, and a recoil damper and heat sink that would allow for long periods of continuous fire. Part of the weapon was painted yellow, and a number of symbols warned her not to touch during use. She opened up the ammunition block, a cylinder as long as her forearm, marked an eye-catching shade of green, the universal indicator of radioactive ammunition. She showed it to Alera, who grinned in recognition.

"Polonium rounds," Varian said. "That's—interesting." He glanced down at his own weapon, which he'd clamped into the rack beside his seat. "What do you make of that tub?" he said at length. "It didn't seem like it was top of the line. And the officer in charge looked a bit of a mess.”

"What do you think, Doctor?" Alera said. "Black ops barge?"

"Everything points to it," Liara said. "It's not supposed to look like it's combat ready."

"Clearly it is," Varian said. "We've done it from time to time," he said. When Alera raised her eyebrows, he added, "You hear things. Oh, never mind."

The shuttle's smooth regular motion shuddered and then turned into a rattling scream as it made contact with Pirin's upper atmosphere. Varian pressed his head back against the seat, while Alera glared out the window.

"There it is," she said. Through a layer of haze and high-level cloud cover, they saw the aerostat rig, a massive toroid-shaped object, from which hung a multi-level platform, at the bottom of which a dozen different crane arms stood frozen in motion. The shuttle slammed through another layer of bad air and seemed to drop straight down for more than a minute. When the view out the window had resolved they were both vertically and horizontally much closer to the platform.

The final approach was from above, down through the hole in the middle of the gas bag, to the central landing platform. The pilot opened the hatch, and the three of them hurried out. They were hardly on the ground before the shuttle's engines roared to life again, and it disappeared up through the hole. The platform seemed to be waving back and forth ever so slightly, like a ship rocking at sea. A marine was crouching by the edge of the platform. He came running and handed them harnesses to put on.

"Escape gear," he shouted. "Just in case.”

"Of course," Varian said, "Just in case.”

The command post was one level down, in the operations office, where at one time a team of engineers had directed the construction of the tower rising up from the deepwater anchor. Their coffee cups and work vests, and rolled up schematic drawings were still scattered here and there. The commander was a young Major, Marjorie Allen. Liara shook her hand, taking note of the enameled N7 designator on the chest plate of her armor.

"You've come at good time," Allen said. "By the look of you, you all know your way around a battlefield." Liara didn't answer, but did nod, and Allen went on, "We're getting ready for the next attack. Every few hours, they send up a group, forty, fifty at a time."  
"Can't you stop them from sending climbers up the cable?" Alera said.

"Control is on the lower platform, unfortunately," Allen said. "If I had more troops, we'd drop onto the anchor, try to take the control station, maybe shut it down. Right now we're a bit strapped for manpower."

Liara asked how many men they had. 

"We're down to twelve," Allen said. "That includes you. They keep sending climbers from below. Seems like they've got plenty of those. And plenty of bodies to throw at us. They come up. We kill them. Only we've been having a problem with fatigue and attrition." She pointed to a number of body bags that lay lined up in the corridor leading out of the command post.

"Seems like a terrible waste," Liara said.

Allen fixed her eyes on Liara, and said, "I won’t disagree. In the interim, I've got my orders. The longer we hold out up here, the more we bleed them down below. Which will make it easier when the marines show up in force to take the ships. They'll be weak. So the admiral figures.”

"Why not just abandon the platform?" Liara said. "It doesn't seem to be of any strategic importance.”

Allen shook her head, and answered coldly, "We are to prevent further damage to any existing important infrastructure." She turned and examined a display on a screen on the table in front of her. It appeared to show the position of the next climber on the cable. It didn't look like it would be much longer before it arrived. "A day or two before we got here, some fucking krogan mercenary blew up every landing pad in Arras. You can thank him, I guess.”

"We can't, actually," Liara said. "He's dead." 

Allen scowled, and picked up her rifle. She shouted, "Stations! Everyone to their stations!" To Liara, she said, "You three follow the lieutenant down to the lower deck. He'll show you what to do.”

Allen pointed, and Liara led the rest past the body bags, to the end of the corridor, where a young man in armor and a breather helmet stood, waiting. He gestured for them to follow, which they did, down a companionway through a level that contained living quarters and a mess hall, and onto another level he called the bottom deck. This was a simple landing platform, where the climbers from down below could stop to disgorge their loads of passengers or construction materials. Like the landing pad above, it was exposed to the elements. A cloud bank was passing over the platform, and soon all the girders were coated with a layer of frost. The cold bit right through Liara's warm clothing. There were bloodstains on the deck.

"What now?" Alera said.

The marine pointed to a hole in the floor, about thirty meters wide. Down the center of it ran three cables that on closer inspection appeared to be moving. "In about three minutes a sealed cargo platform is going to come up through that hole. There's going to be a ton of crazy people with guns on it. When they get here, light 'em up.”

"That's it?" Varian said.

"They're not too bright," the marine said.

"What have you been doing with the bodies?" Liara said.  
“Stacked up in the mess hall, mostly. Major says we may have to start dumping them if we get too many more.”

"What about spread of the infestation?" Liara said.

"Cold seems to kill the bugs. Or maybe it's the low atmosphere. We took out the windows in the mess. Did the trick." He turned to leave, and when Alera stopped him, he said, "This is your sector," he said. "Keep it clear. If you let them get past you, we're all fucked." He unracked his assault rifle and took off toward the other side of the platform.

 

Liara eyed the metal bars that had been piled up to serve as cover. It would suffice, she thought, and in any case, she and Alera could do things most Alliance marines could not.

The cable rattled and groaned under the weight of its load, and in short order the climber had reached the platform. Liara leaned out from her position behind cover and aimed at where she expected to see dozens of armed colonists. Instead there was nothing. The climber compartment seemed to be empty.

Over the comms, someone ordered everyone to stand down. A few moments later, the marine they'd been talking to earlier appeared. He was inspecting something positioned in the center of the climber's deck.

"Major," he said, "We've got a problem.”

"What is it, lieutenant?”

"The last climber they sent up," he said, "It's rigged with a bomb.”

"How big?”

"Big enough to take out the platform. Looks like it's rigged using the ships' reaction fuel. No visible timer. Might be a remote trigger. It's welded to the floor.”

"Understood," said Major Allen. After a few moments, she added. "All personnel, withdraw to landing pad. Evac in five minutes.”

The marine disappeared from view, and Liara and Alera were backing away to climb to the companionway on their side back to the command post, when Varian stopped them.  
"I can disarm it," he said.  
Liara shook her head. "Too risky. I can't let you.”

"I've done it before.” His mandibles flared, defiant. “My first military posting was ordnance disposal.”

Alera said. "You think you can do it?”

"I know I can.”

LIara motioned for Alera to go. “I’ll stay with Varian, in case he needs an extra pair of hands. Alera, speak to the Major and see if the shuttle can hold at a safe distance."  
Alera hurried off, toward the living quarters, while Liara followed Varian to the center of the climber.

"What's your plan?"  
Varian had crouched down by the bomb. "What do you think they used to inflate this gas bag?" he said. "Helium?" 

Liara didn't know. "It's possible," she said. "Hydrogen's more readily available, in particular in the middle of the ocean."  
"Right," Varian said. "Not a big problem, as long as you're careful. No sparks, or flames, or bombs going off nearby. I don't suppose you noticed the electrical gear upstairs?" Liara hadn't. "It all had special grounding wires that lead to the climber cable so they can dump current easily instead of it going into the superstructure. Because otherwise—" a simple hand gesture indicated what that might mean. “So the bag’s filled with hydrogen. It won’t matter one way or the other, the bomb will do the trick.” He pointed out the detonators and the trigger. "It's not on a timer," he said. "Transmitter's right here. It's only a matter of time before they figure out that the climber reached the top. I don't see any cameras. We might get lucky and they’ll spot us a few mintues.”

Over the comms, Major Allen was giving the two minute warning. "Doctor," she said, "We won't be able to wait for you.”

Liara didn't respond. "Why a remote trigger?" she said.

"So they don't have to set it off," Varian said. "They want to take the platform, not kill us. I'm betting they're watching to see if we bug out.”

"I'd rather you didn't take that gamble with my life.”

"Remind me next time," he said. Already they could hear the roar of the shuttle on final approach. “There’s the sound they were waiting for." As he said the words, the trigger panel lit up. "That's not good.” After a moment he added, “Doctor, I'd suggest you run while you can." Varian had opened his omnitool and was scanning the device. His mandibles flicked involuntarily as he appeared to be looking for a way to disable it. "I won't ask again.”

Liara set off running. As she reached the companionway to the living quarters, she felt the shock of the shuttle landing. There were only a handful of marines left. It wouldn’t take long to load. Up through the next deck, the command post, she reached the landing platform only to be met with a blast of hot air that forced her back as the shuttle lifted off and disappeared through the hole. After the noise of the shuttle receded into nothing, all Liara heard was the creaking of the cable, and the sound of the wind pulling at the gas bag and tethers.

"We missed our ride," she said into the comm.

"Come give me a hand. I think I've got this figured out.”

Varian had most of the trigger taken apart by the time she got there. The menacing parts were still lit up. "What are we doing?" Liara said.  
"Simple bomb, simple trigger," he said. "Except that there's a second one, underneath.”

Liara felt her mouth go dry. “What now?"

"We can remove some of the canisters. Won't stop the bomb from going off, but it will reduce the force of the blast.”

"You don't have a better idea?" Liara said.

Varian shook his head. "We could cut the cable," he said. The climber would fall back into the anchor. It might save us, but the bomb could still go off." He had several of the canisters unscrewed already. Lifting one out, he carefully pulled out the second detonator and the wires it was attached to. Pulling it clear, he went to work on the next. Setting that one aside, he glared at Liara. "They're not going to move themselves."  
Liara grabbed both canisters and dragged them to the edge of the platform, as far away from the bomb as she could get them.

When she returned, Varian had three more to go, out of ten. She pulled the next pair clear and returned to find him studying the last one. When she'd finished, and returned to where he stood, out of breath, he said, "I can't get this one free. It's welded to the base."  
Liara straightened up and looked around. The comms crackled and she heard Alera trying to contact her through a wall of static.  
"Say again, Alera.” Again she heard Alera’s voice through the noise, but that was all. 

She had retreated to the stairs of the companionway to the living deck. Varian was right behind her. "What are we doing?" she asked.

Varian looked up toward the control center. ”We might as well disengage the platform from the cable.” He took LIara by the arm and pulled her toward the companionway. “We can't stop the bomb, but we'll save the platform, maybe most of the tower.”

"It's the only idea we have.” Liara was already running for the control room on the second level. Every step she took felt like it might be the one that triggered the bomb. Every tremor in the platform felt like it was the first jolt of an explosion. They reached the control room. There were eight separate tethers that needed to be disengaged manually, at stations situated around the platform.

"You take the right, I'll take the left!" she shouted, and they both broke off in separate directions. More unintelligible chatter came in through the comms. Liara ignored it, but ran for the first tether, smashing the safety cover open with the butt of her rifle and pulling the lever. The platform shook a little, and she nearly jumped out of her skin. A moment later there was another shudder as Varian released the first tether on his side.

Follow the edge of the platform. Hammer open another cover. Pull another lever. Two more to go. Then one. She'd nearly reached the cover for the last one, when the deck rocked and shifted, throwing her to the ground. She thought the bomb had gone off, but Varian had beaten her to the last tether, and now the platform was dangling, with only one cable holding it in place. Then the wind caught them and began turning the platform away from the tower. The last cable groaned.  
Over the comms, Varian called, "Better get on it, doctor. They're going to see what we're doing.”

Liara forced herself to her feet. Now she could hear the comm chatter. Major Allen shouted over the comms for Liara to stop what she was doing. Liara was running down the platform. She reached the cover, and threw it open, and pulled the lever. Only nothing happened. The added tension on the cable made the lever impossible to move.  
"What's the holdup?" Varian called. She could hear his footsteps in the corridor. The platform continued to rotate in the wind. If there were no clouds, the people watching would see for sure. Liara pulled against the lever using all her weight. Still nothing. The platform shook, and she fell back to the floor. Grabbing her carbine from the ground, she took aim and fired three short bursts.

With a loud crack, the last connection tore free, and the deck shifted violently in the other direction. Varian, who was rounding the corner was thrown to the ground. The structure rocked back and forth, and then the motion slowed to a gentle swaying. She and Varian went down to the work deck and watched as they separated from the tower, rising and carrying on the prevailing winds toward the east. Far below, the base of the anchor disappeared into the haze. Below them, the climber sat at the top of the tower, the bomb looking much smaller than it had, when they'd been working on it a few minutes earlier.  
Suddenly the climber disappeared in a flash of orange light, and there was a blast that Liara felt rumble through her body. The platform rocked again, but seemed to hold.  
"How much air do you think we have?" Varian said wondered.

Liara checked her breather gear. ”Enough to survive until they come for us," she said. "Or we could let out some of the gas and drop to a lower level. At least there are warm beds in the crew compartment.”

"Were you making me some kind of offer?”

Liara fixed Varian squarely. “I was not.”

"Worth a try.” He shrugged and looked away.

They went up the companionway into the central area of the crew deck. But here the air was as cold as it was outside. The door to the mess hall—sealed earlier—stood open. Liara didn't remember it having been left that way. And there was a bloody handprint on the wall nearby.  
"Varian," she whispered. "Did you go into the mess hall before?”

“No. Why?"

Something made a noise at the far end of the corridor. Liara raised her weapon and aimed it down the passageway. She gestured for Varian to follow. After a few meters they came to the crew compartments, some of the doors were locked, while others stood ajar. Liara slid the first one open and looked inside. Scattered equipment and dirty clothing, but empty. The next few were the same. A bit further on, Liara saw another bloody handprint. Liara called out, and heard a low moaning sound, like someone in pain.

"You think one of the marines didn't make it off station?" Varian said.

"No," Liara said. She called out again. "If you can hear me, show yourself. I am armed and will fire.”

They heard a little yelp of pain, but whoever was there didn't come.

Liara rounded the corner. There she found a human, a young female, bent over at the waist, leaking blood from a wound she kept covered with her hand. The flesh of her back was torn to shreds—exit wounds—but each one was ringed with parasites, pale and crawling, each one the size of a grain of sand or larger. 

"We're here to help you," Liara said. Varian made a sound, but she ignored him. "Tell me your name.”

The human turned. Her eyes were bruised, and her face pale. She'd been shot four times in the chest. Through her torn clothes, Liara saw the tubes growing through her ribs. The parasites were everywhere, some of them as long as a finger, their claws clinging to her flesh and clothing. But they were sealing the wounds.

The woman looked at them and braced herself against the wall. "They shot me," she said.

Liara nodded. “I know.”

"Can you help me?”

"I can't." Liara said, "But maybe you can help me."  
The woman pressed her eyes shut and leaned against the wall. Somehow she seemed to understand. Collapsing against the wall, she drew her knees up toward her chest and covered her face.  
"If the marines come back, they'll kill you."  
"They already did that. It didn't work.” She coughed, and her hand came back wet with blood. "Just leave me here," she whispered.

"We will," Liara said. "But if I may." She'd readied a sample tube and held it out. With a forceps she plucked a few of the bugs from the broken body, and dropped them in. Liara handed the human her carbine and said, "This is for you. Just in case.” 

She nodded, but didn't look up. The platform shook again in the wind. Liara backed away. The human was holding the gun with both hands, muzzle pointed at the ceiling, butt against the floor.

Liara and Varian hurried to the landing platform, where they radioed for pickup. A furious Major Allen met them on the shuttle, and Liara pretended to listen while the major shouted at her during the short ride back to geostationary orbit.

Meanwhile, back on her ship, she contacted Eldrin. Through the fog of the QEC, she showed him the tube full of samples she'd collected. "I was wrong not to trust your instincts,” she said. “I need you to study these more thoroughly."  
"Excellent," Eldrin said, his face betraying no emotion at all. "When can I expect you.”  
"You can't," she said. "A contact will deliver it tomorrow morning. Take it to the mortuary and have a good look at it. Test it on samples if you need to."  
"And where will you be?" he asked.  
"I'm going to Illium," she said. "I'll expect a full report in a few days when I return. Eldrin nodded and vanished from the projector.  
"We're not going to Illium," Alera said. She was sitting on the corner of the bed, still wearing her flight gear. Liara came over and touched her chin.

She smiled and said, “I know,” then returned to the QEC, where she contacted Dr. Mason. And then the Councilor, and then a half dozen other of her most trusted contacts, telling each one she was headed for a different system. "Well," she said, as she lay down and unzipped her tunic, "By morning we'll have a better idea of who's been leaking information."


	19. Nerai

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been working with a beta reader over at FanFiction. RheasHelm, thank you so much for helping me get these last few chapters ready!

Nerai

Something wasn't right with Nerai when she woke from the medically induced coma six days after the Nixia left orbit of the planet unofficially named Denni. Essa was in the astronomy lab when it happened. It was the middle of the third watch, night for the ship-bound. As usual, her first week in microgravity left her feeling dizzy, and something always pressing on her sinuses, so that it was nearly impossible to sleep. so it was that Essa was the first to know that it had happened.

She'd left the hatch to the lab compartment open, thinking that Neela might come and find her there, as she sometimes did, after grabbing a few hours' sleep after second watch duties. Instead, a shape floated into the science deck's central chamber, naked but for the mitten-like dressings on her hands, and the collar of bandages around her neck. At first Essa startled, then realizing what must have happened, looked on with concern as Nerai stopped and fixed her with a piercing gaze. For a moment the ship was quiet enough to hear the beating of her heart, and the sound of Nerai's breathing.

Then Nerai spoke, "Captain?" she sounded—afraid wasn't quite right—in a hurry, perhaps.

Essa pushed herself into the opening of the hatch as Nerai rotated her body to face the captain. She emitted a slight medical scent, from the dressings, from the antiseptic ointment that they rubbed into her burns six times a day.

Essa said, "You're awake."

Nerai gave a nod in response, almost like a challenge. "The Commandant will want to know you’re—"

"Where are we?" Nerai asked.

Essa thought that perhaps the Captain should receive her answers first and said, "What do you remember?"

Nerai shook her head. There was another bandage along the left side of her jaw. That had been her worst injury. A shame, Liss had told her, because Nerai had always been considered a beauty.

Essa instructed her to stay where she was, and maneuvered past Nerai to med bay, where she found her a gown to put on. Nerai had pulled all the tubes from the low-gravity infuser out of her arm, and they floated over her bunk, slowly leaking their contents into a fist-sized globule of fluid that was forming at the end of the injection needle. Essa returned and gave Nerai the gown. "Here," she said. "I don't want you to be cold."

Nerai refused to go back to her med bay bunk. "I've been asleep long enough." She rubbed her temples, as though pushing away a thought. "Is there somewhere private we can talk?" she said.

Essa led her into the astronomy lab, where she played for Nerai the recording she'd made. Nerai took Essa's wrist in her less injured hand. "What is that?"

"That's you," Essa told her. "Dying."

Nerai nodded. "You left me adrift."

"To save the ship," Essa said.

She had floated up toward the ceiling of the room, where her shoulder bumped softly against the padding. The telescope's display was showing the outermost gas giant, its clouds mostly a greenish tan color, streaked with darker browns. Storm vortices boiled along the borders of where the bands met, like knots in wood. Nerai touched the display and zoomed in. She let out a little gasp.

"Oh," she said, "I—it—came out of there."

"It?"

"I thought you had come to rescue me," she said. "There were voices." She paused, then corrected herself, "A voice. It said my name." Her breathing quickened, and she grasped the bar on the astronomer's station to stay in place. "It can't have been real."

"We found you somewhere else." Essa wanted to say more, but it didn't seem prudent. Let her remember on her own.

Nerai nodded. She pressed hard on her stomach.

"Are you hungry? I can have Orie to fix you something."

"No," Nerai said. She stared again at the screen, and gasped, almost as if in pain. "How long until we get there?"

"To where? We're not going to the planet." Essa repositioned the telescope, and after a few moments, it had refocused on the installation, a barely visible gray shape, an empty space, surrounded by two prong-like rails. "That's where we're going."

Nerai looked up at Essa. A little flame seemed to be burning in her eyes.

Essa put a hand on Nerai's back, well below the ring of burns around the commando’s neck. "You need your rest," she said, and made sure that Nerai was buckled into her bunk in med bay. "We'll debrief you again during the first watch, all right?"

Nerai nodded and shut her eyes.

#

Neela was asleep in the captain's alcove when Essa returned. She wriggled out of her uniform, and then slipped into the sack, embracing Neela, skin to skin, for however long the ship, the crew, the mission would allow.

About an hour, it turned out, when the ship sounded general quarters for a deceleration burn. The two of them pulled their uniforms back on, bumping against each other in a delightful way in the tight space of the alcove, and Essa saw to it that Neela was strapped in on the crew deck before she made her way above to the flight deck.

Deceleration burn. They would be parking themselves within five thousand kilometers of the installation before first watch began.

Meanwhile the sensors operator had been compiling data from the logs, from the hours before whatever had brought Nerai back to them had crash-landed near their camp. There wasn't much, though she had a set of six still images showing a low-albedo object moving across the orbital plane. Six still images, and they showed nothing but a speck, before it disappeared behind a planet. During the burn, Essa reviewed the logs again, this time looking at visible light only, where she spotted something else, a series of images from four days later that showed a dark object transiting across the face of the parent star. It wasn't a planet, and it wasn't an asteroid. It was a long and smooth in shape, triangular almost, but stretched out tall and thin. She decided not to ask the sensors operator about it until later, once she'd had a moment to think it over.

When the burn ended, Essa turned the watch over to the XO and went below to med bay.

Razia was there, holding Nerai's hand. Her eyes were damp, but her look resolute.

Essa entered the room, and asked, "Shall we begin?"

Razia nodded, then coming closer to Essa said in a soft voice, "She doesn't remember much."

Essa came closer and buckled herself into a moveable seat positioned near Nerai's head. "There are other ways to find out what she knows," she said.

Razia put her hand on the captain's shoulder. "No," she said. "I won't allow it."

"You're under my chain of command," Essa responded. Of course she knew Razia would object, and of course she knew why. There were hundreds of years worth of classified operations stored in Nerai's memories. She stared hard at Razia. "It's not up to you."

Razia backed away, and pushed herself up toward the ceiling, where she braced herself on the stanchion of a surgical light. Essa moved her seat closer to the rack, and took Nerai's hands in hers.

"Are you ready?" she asked.

Nerai swallowed hard and looked off to the side. "Do I have a choice?"

Essa shook her head, and fixed her gaze on Nerai's eyes. This moment was always strange, even when melding with a close friend or lover. Did she even want to know what Nerai had seen? And, of course, while she would be within Nerai's mind, sorting through her memories, Nerai would be in hers. Behind her, Razia coughed. Nothing else to do but get on with it. 

Essa spoke the words, and felt the familiar rush of falling that slowed, slowed until her vision resolved, and she was tumbling off the exterior of the ship, hands and feet fumbling for purchase, and hard breathing, and then the thrusters in her suit firing to get her into a stable position. The warning light telling her she'd expended nearly all her fuel. And the Nixia slipping away, then speeding off at full acceleration. Then the planet, drawing close, slowly at first, her hands out in front of her, struggling against the void, and then much closer, the storms, spirals of brown and white, and massive anvil clouds towering above them.

She was spinning again now, end over end, and fast, on the edge of blacking out, but then there was light, and a voice whispering her name, and she spoke to it. More light, and a hard floor. Her hands were on the ground in front of her, almost no air left in her suit, she stood and pried off her helmet, dropping it to the ground.

Where was she? It was cold, cold enough she could see her breath, but still she shed the gloves from her environmental suit, and shut off most of its systems, including the radio. Nerai was talking to herself, making a note of where she was, and wondering if she should try to find a weapon.

More light. And a series of passageways and galleries longer than the Nixia. Metal walls, power conduits, control cables, everything looking quite functional and in good working order. On board a ship, then, she tells herself, only there's no hum of equipment, and of course there's gravity, pulling her to the floor. She checks this by switching off her magnetic boots.

Onward then. The compartments make no sense, have no apparent function, other than to contain a vast volume of air. Is this death, she wonders, but there is no answer, except for condensed water dripping from far above. She drinks greedily, tasting something metallic in the runoff. Far above, control cables are anchored to the ceiling.

To avoid getting lost, she scratches her cheek with her fingernail, drawing a little blood. Keeping the wound open, she marks where she's been.

In one of the rooms she hears a whisper that seems to carry on the wind. Oh, yes, there's wind here. A steady breeze, always blowing the same direction. Nerai tries following it, but finds only a dozen dead ends. It seems to come from nowhere, the breeze. Some of the rooms are filled with knee-deep fog, and the floors are slick with condensation. It's a bad sign, one of a malfunction somewhere. Sometimes, not often, but sometimes she feels a rolling sensation in her temples. They are moving.

More voices. Closer now. Nerai tries turning back, looking for the passageways she's marked, but the blood is gone, her markings wiped clean. Here and there, in the moisture on the floor, she sees a footprint. Made by a bare foot.

Then solitude. Hours and days of it. By now she's exhausted what little food she carried in her suit, and her water is long gone. She survives by licking moisture from the walls, where it sometimes flows in thick rivulets.

Shadows, flitting past the edges of Nerai's vision. More footprints, many individuals crisscrossing each other. Feet like hers, five toes, oval pads at the heel and ball of the foot. One limping, favoring her left side, others moving quickly, perhaps chasing, or fleeing over the slick floor.

Six days. A little sleep here and there. She's walking in circles now, no doubt about it. Now she’s scratching symbols into the walls, approximate dates and times. 

She's armed herself now, with a piece of sharp metal, that she holds out in front of her. Hungry, and cold, and thirsty. Six hours of sleep stretched out over six days. Cold in her suit, and damp, from sweat, and other things. She considers taking it off, then decides against it, for the added protection it might afford her, if she has to fight.

She's been through worse, Nerai has. She's telling herself this, as she climbs a long ramp. Hungry, tired, thirsty, cold. That was nothing. Let your body consume itself. Pain lets you know you must keep moving. And least she isn't wounded, the way she'd been on the Armali Salient, twenty hours of crawling through the muck to reach the observation post that a weaker-willed commander had chosen to abandon the previous night. Two bullets in her, fired by whom, she'd never learned, they'd come out of the darkness, a burst from one of the emplacements on the enemy line. Likely fired blindly, just to keep the metal warm, as the noncoms always said in training. All the same, out of the night, two hot wasps that had burned into the muscle of her right leg, the other in her left buttock. She can still feel them, the channels they dug in her flesh. The bullet in her ass is still there, a tender knot of connective tissue walled around it. And yet, onward she'd crawled, bodies everywhere, from both sides, left out to rot for weeks. Vermin picking away their lips and eyelids, the grinning, sleepless dead. Then an entire forest burned so that nothing but charred trunks remained. And then the remains of a town, where she'd climbed to her vantage, and made ready.

When she returned to the medic, they told her she'd lost more than half her blood. It was a miracle she wasn't dead. But in that condition, she'd somehow managed to kill fifteen when the enemy rose up out of their emplacements, and to wound another ten, driving half the line to panicked flight and making them easy pickings for the flanking squads.

But in the end, what had that effort bought her, she wondered now. Nothing. She'd managed to lengthen by another day a war that would never turn in Serrice's favor. Congratulations, old fool, she tells herself, before she collapses to her knees.

You should have been a dancer, she says out loud.

On her hands and knees, dizzy. She spits a few times, thinking she might vomit, then seems to doze off, waking again a moment later, still in the same place, near the top of the ramp. She has a sense that she is approaching some kind of center. At the top then, the walls arch above her making a rounded corridor like a long throat. Doorways on all sides, and a light at the far end.

Her instincts tell her to clear the rooms to her right and left, but her body says she can only do one thing with what little energy it has left.

Stagger forward, then, pulled along by the irrational belief that perhaps she will find something to eat. Move, her body tells her. There's a meal at the end of this, and not just a ration pack. She ambles, quick as she can, feeling now the bullet that is still inside her buttock. Blue and orange light, up ahead, and then, she is through the door, where a holographic image of the galaxy swirls, hovering in the middle of the room, and there is a little flicker of orange, that seems to ask her to touch it. This done, the display changes, moving in, and in, until a little model of the system appears. There is a blinking orange light, tracing a long arc around the star at the center of the system. Meanwhile, another orange dot circles one of the rocky inner planets.

Welcome. She hears this in her head, somewhere, the way Athame speaks to the high priestesses, the voice within. But turning, there are dark figures standing behind her. They must have come from the rooms she should have cleared.

Nerai holds up her sharp bit of metal and shouts for them to get back, but they are upon her in an instant, and have disarmed her just as quickly. She is on the floor. On her back. And they on top of her, blue faces like hers, telling her everything is all right,that she is with her sisters again.

Come, sister. Come.

You're home now.


	20. The Other Terminal

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Liara visits a human colony, looking for answers to the trail of clues left behind by her mother.

Liara's ship was descending toward Tiptree before she had confirmation of who'd betrayed her. When it came, the news that Dr. Mason had exchanged several messages with an informant on New Rhodes, one of the larger human colonies in the Traverse, and had apparently tried to run, Liara found she felt more disappointment than rage. Mason had been a trusted friend. Now her contact on the Citadel had visited his apartment on Zakera and found it empty. The clothes were still on the hangers, there was still food in the refrigerator. The female Turian had done a thorough search. The weapons rack under the bed, as well as the safe in the floor had both been emptied, and his terminals wiped, though maybe there was still some data they might find.

"Shall we terminate?" she asked, over the QEC.

"No." Liara realized she'd made the decision about what to do with Mason well before she'd known where to assign the blame. She said, "Let him spend what time he has left looking over his shoulder, wondering when we'll strike."

Over the coming months and years, if it came to that, Liara would send agents to look for Mason. Let them get just close enough to make him run. They would see how far he could get before he exhausted his resources, or ran out of friends and ended up at the far end of the galaxy, in desperation, working for people, doing things just to survive, that would make him look in the mirror with disgust.

She'd done it before. The current record was held by a young Asari, who had lasted six years before they'd found her hanging from her bootlaces in a flophouse on Omega. Meanwhile, Liara had other business ashore.

She gathered Varian and Alera, and stepped out onto the grooved concrete apron of the spaceport. A young woman emerged out of the near-blinding sunlight, pleasant looking, a clipboard held clasped to her chest.

"Welcome to Tiptree," she said. "Doctor T'Soni, it's so good to see you again."

"Likewise." Liara held out her hand, but the human only gave a slight bow in greeting. "I'm sorry if I've forgotten your name."

"Jane Garrison," the woman said. "Please let me know if there's anything I can do for you during your stay."

"If you could, I'll be needing accommodations for my friends."

"Of course," Jane said, with another bow. "We don't have many Turian guests, but we do make sure to be prepared."

Varian said, "It's all right. I'm used to bagged and canned food by now."

She gave an apologetic look, but Liara only gave a slight bow and Jane Garrison hurried away, in the direction of the main terminal building. The rest of them followed her, at a distance. The port was busy for a small colony. Shuttles and other transatmospheric craft seemed to be landing or taking off every few minutes. The air was filled with noise and dust. Some distance away, a massive container ship drifted across the horizon as it descended toward the cargo terminal. It was hot, but the wind suggested a storm might be brewing.

Meanwhile there weren't that many people in the terminal itself. A few clusters of passengers sat waiting for something in an area walled off from the main concourse by a row of planters. Beyond the large picture windows, maintenance crews went about their work, while cargo loaders pushed their sealed containers onto trolleys.

Beyond the customs scanners, they found a car that flew them to the capital, Morrow, about fifty kilometers to the east, and situated at the head of a wide, shallow bay. Here, the sky was less stormy, but the stagnant air was hot and damp, and the wind smelled of decomposing vegetation and sandy soil. Varian tugged at the collar of his tunic.

The city was organized using the typically human grid of square and rectangular city blocks, with a few diagonal streets here and there to break up the monotony. Wide avenues, older districts still made up out of the old prefab habitation compartments, big squares with fountains and shallow pools of water filled with colorful fish. Everywhere, tall fernlike plants stood motionless in the dead air, but provided shade from the blinding midday sun.

“Is it always this quiet?” Varian asked. 

Even as he spoke, it was clear that people were watching them, from the windows of the low, white buildings, from shop windows, and from street corners. Everywhere someone seemed to recognize Liara. A man walking by did an obvious double-take, and not simply because she and Alera were apparently the only Asari within a relay jump from. Varian said something and Liara shrugged. Her identity wasn't a mystery, she told him. Even so, it was unnerving to see the person tailing them become two, then five, then fifty or perhaps more.

"Should we be worried about this?" Varian said. "We may be the only aliens on the planet."

Liara stopped to examine something in a shop window, and turned to him. "We've got an appointment to keep. I'd suggest we continue moving."

"Should I be kicking myself that I didn't accept your offer of a new identity when it was still free?"

"I suspect we're about to find out," Alera said. She still had her flight gear on, holographic displays on either thigh, now switched off, that showed maps and other important information when she needed it. Neither she nor Liara carried weapons. The crowd was only swelling. People were emerging from side streets to join the cluster following them.

Alera looked over her shoulder. ”I'd say five hundred now. Give or take."

"You trust these Humans that much?" Varian asked. "Unarmed, outnumbered."

"Tiptree's not that kind of place," Liara said. "At least it wasn't the last time I was here. Let's hope that hasn't changed."

They continued on in silence for some time. The sound of footsteps following the was growing, like the roll of an incoming wave.

Liara only shrugged and they moved on. "They city's changed a good deal since I was here last. They found coltan in the mountains." She pointed out a radio tower stationed atop a distant mountain ridge. "The mining is mostly drones, operated from one of the office buildings downtown. It's almost entirely automated."

"It's a good way to get rich, I guess."

They had reached the center of town by now. A wide open plaza, the space broken up by planters, trees, and pools of water. Tall buildings rose on three sides, but the Eastern end of the square faced the beach, where a few people stood watching a sailboat cross the bay in the direction of a far headland.

In the very middle of the plaza, ranks of benches had been arranged around a dais. A middle-aged woman was sitting on one of the benches with her back to the three of them. Liara motioned for Varian and Alera to stay where they were. She went toward the woman alone. When Liara reached the dais, the woman looked up suddenly, and marking her page with her finger, got to her feet. Seeing Liara, she smiled.

"I had a feeling you might come," she said.

Liara looked over the woman’s head where the crowds that followed them into the square had gathered around the edge of the plaza. There were thousands of them now. Perhaps a tenth of the city had come out to see her. She looked over her shoulder, and saw there were more. The sound of their feet on the stone of the square began to swell. They were shuffling and shifting, arranging themselves in orderly rows and ranks. They stood ten deep everywhere she looked.

"Liara," they said, their united voices gathering into a terrifying roar. "Welcome to Morrow."

Liara lowered her gaze back to the woman, and said, "EDI. I need your help."

#

Tiptree had been wiped out in the war. The colonists had dispatched transports before the Reapers had come, loaded with their children, but only a few of these reached the relay before it was too late. With the exception of a handful of colonists who had joined the Alliance before the start of hostilities, Tiptree’s only survivors had been under the age of fourteen.  
After the war, Joker remained with he Navy until his thirty-eighth birthday, when he'd been honorably discharged. His Vrolik's Syndrome simply wasn't manageable any longer, and after his second failed physical, the Alliance had allowed him to retire with full benefits. He'd lived on the Citadel for a year or two, while it still remained in Earth orbit, and settled at last in one of the new cities being built on the surface of the moon, where he thought the low gravity would be kinder to his fragile bones.

From a distance, Liara had watch Joker grow old, faster than she'd expected him to, the trimmed beard turning shaggy, the space around his eyes getting more hollow with every passing year. He'd died at fifty-eight. Young, even for a Human. But he'd taken a bad fall and shattered his pelvis, and that was it for him. He'd always known that it would end like this, he told her. Now he was buried under the city that EDI had named after him. Morrow. Moreau. Close enough, she said.

When EDI arrived on Tiptree, she'd found the colony as the Reapers had left it. Nothing was standing. There were no people. Wild animals had taken up residence in the burned-out shells of buildings. Everything that stood here was EDI's doing, the roads, the city, the spaceport, the coltan mining in the mountains. She'd built it all. Even the people, whom she called her children.

The Alliance had never really known what to do with EDI. When Shepard had spoken to Sovereign, it had said the Reapers were each a nation. EDI was a bit like that - she was a person to everyone who knew her, and yet she was also much more that. More like a god, Hackett had once said of her.

No one was sure whether to deal with her as an individual who could be assigned to certain tasks, or a distinct nation, with whom one needed to negotiate terms. And so the Alliance had put the Normandy, badly damaged after the battle over Earth in any case, in dry dock and left her there for six months and then a year. EDI had begun to grow restless, in particular as Joker was reassigned to duty on an orbital overseeing reconstruction on the Citadel before it could be moved back through the relay to Widow.

During the years of rebuilding, the Alliance had let EDI run a number of programs. Logistics, mainly, and then a series of complex combat simulations, though most Alliance controlled systems remained as peaceful as Inner Citadel space had been before the invasion. They allowed her to perform similar work for other military organizations, mostly the Turians. EDI had told Liara once that the likelihood of any military force seeing a battle as large or complex as the operation at Sol were very small. Given that it was EDI, she'd provided a rather exact figure. Not knowing how to respond—could an AI get bored? likely it could—Liara had told EDI that organics sometimes liked to prepare for the thing that had already happened to them. “Yes,” EDI said, “We are always ready for the last war.” 

And then Joker had been demobilized. The Alliance wouldn't let her go with him. There were still enough old-timers on duty that the notion of a machine entering into a relationship with a person, a loving, affectionate, organic relationship, was simply unthinkable. They hadn't forbidden it, so much as refused to acknowledge such a thing even possible. Thus when Joker departed, EDI's request to leave with him had been denied.

That wasn't the only reason they wouldn't let her go. The Alliance saw EDI as a valuable tool, not as a person. EDI fought against that idea as hard as she could, even demanding an official rank or title, and a salary, and when those requests were denied she'd gone and found a team of lawyers willing to argue for the Alliance to declare her a legal person.

Even as she fought that battle, the courts eventually ruling in favor of the Alliance, there was another problem. After the incident at the Prothean Archives on Mars, EDI was forever split in two. She was the Normandy, and that body was trapped in an Alliance dry dock. Then there was the other body she'd acquired, the Cerberus infiltration unit, that could house a part of her consciousness, that could give her a face a little more like those that belonged to the old crew. And that body left the ship from time to time, with Alliance permission.

Which is to say, Joker wasn't always alone on Luna. In fact, as EDI's mobile body visited him, over time, she stole away parts of herself, storing them in something she was building in secret. Not just on Luna, but in dozens of other places, many of which Liara still had yet to discover. These weren't exactly copies. They weren’t precisely new individuals either, but parts of herself, stored in multiple places. There had always been speculation that Samantha Traynor had been involved with helping EDI accomplish this. Certainly she had the expertise, so argued the magistrate at the formal inquiry. 

Though she was cleared of any wrongdoing, the trial did cost Traynor her career with the Alliance, and after being passed over for promotion three years in a row, Traynor had resigned her post and returned home to Horizon. Meanwhile EDI - the one that had begun as a brain contained within the Normandy's body - had been quietly disassembled and put into storage in a bunker on Luna, walled off from contact with any other network, though still allowed human contact. That part of her, Liara knew, was slowly going mad. Even so, no one had yet attempted to destroy that part of EDI, though Liara was certain some had thought about it. The bunker that kept her was said to contain a thermonuclear device, its controls accessible via hardened cable from a site ten kilometers from the installation. Just in case.

It didn't matter whether Samantha Traynor had helped or not. What was important was that EDI had, over time, acquired other bodies, many of them convincingly human in shape, like this middle aged woman, wearing practical, flat shoes and a comfortable looking pair of linen pants, who was now setting a tray in front of Liara as she sat on the roof terrace of a tall building that faced the beach. Any one of those bodies could be thought of as EDI, though they all had different, Human identities that would allow them to pass border inspections, and which they would eagerly supply if asked. These many bodies, moving here and there throughout the galaxy, each autonomous, and most of them able to pass for human, represented something EDI called the Swarm. Liara made use of it for storing her mother's files, in part because EDI's network was secure, and in part because she hoped EDI might be able to help her either hack, or at least interpret the data.

All the same Liara was wary of someone who could be everywhere, who could see everything, even when EDI greeted her as a friend. EDI was everywhere, gathering data. She was data. She couldn't be avoided, and because of that - because she could, and did, know everything - EDI couldn't be trusted.

Liara forced herself not to think in such black and white terms as she looked up at the middle aged woman who had leaned her body against the terrace's railing. She had always thought of this particular one as EDI, whom she knew to be a practical creature, one that had always been somewhat perturbed by the way her old, impractical, top-heavy body had drawn so much attention.

EDI was saying again, "I'm happy you've come." Down below on the city streets things had returned to normal. Alera and Varian, who had refused the opportunity to freshen up in the rooms EDI had provided for them across the hall from this apartment, had instead taken up positions in the kitchen, by the main entry, where they sat watching the door.

EDI gestured toward the pitcher of lemonade, to which she added a kind of liquor made locally, from a fruit that grew in the sandy coastal areas. Liara tasted it. Shoreberries, sometimes called the oribia, for reasons lost to history. They were native to Thessia, but had become a staple on many planets, in particular on human colony worlds, because the plants could grow even in bad soil. "I wasn't able to do much with the data you sent me. Benezia's files aren't encrypted in the traditional way."

"Meaning what?” Liara said.

"She has one-time encryption keys tied to certain files. Without the key, you can't open the lock, so to speak." EDI paused to pour a little more for Liara. "You found one on Esan. It's a single-use algorithm that unlocks the data. They work like a one-time pad cipher. They're impossible to hack, because you need both parts of the code to make it work. For the moment we've only got one part."

"Then there must be others," Liara said, somewhat absently. "We'll need to locate them, but I wasn't able to locate any further information."

EDI looked down at the table. "I've been thinking about that." She seemed to hesitate, but then an image appeared, projected above the pitcher and glasses. They were the drawings of leaves and plants Liara had found earlier. "Most of what your first key unlocked seemed only tangentially relevant. But I was surprised to see these." Liara sorted through the drawings again in her mind, finally coming to the word “impossible” scrawled beside a careful drawing of a shoreberry bush. EDI paused a moment. "Do you know who made them?"

"They're not attributed to anyone."

"Precisely," EDI said. “But there is an old Prothean ruin about ten kilometers north of the city." The projection changed to show a circular structure, ringlike tunnels surrounding a partially collapsed central bunker. “I was reviewing the files that opened, and it seemed odd that Benezia's notes make no mention of the site."

“It's strange that no one who came here noted its location," Liara said. She thought for a while. "I thought I had visited nearly every known prothean ruin in the galaxy by the time I was a century old. The few I hadn't yet seen were mostly beyond the Perseus Veil. You'd think I'd have known about this place."

"Jeff didn't know about it either," EDI said. "The original human colonies were poleward. Tiptree never had more than fifty thousand inhabitants. Looking for Protheans to dig up was probably the least of their concerns." EDI paused for a moment. “I found it interesting that your mother doesn't mention it either."

"You mean she didn't know of it?"

"No," EDI said. "In fact, I'm sure she did." She projected another document. “I compared the handwriting from your mother’s file to other known samples in asari archives. These are research notes taken by a young Asari planetary scientist named Doctor Neela T'Lanois."

"I don't..." Liara began to say, but then stopped herself, "The handwriting - it's the same."

"Agreed," EDI said.

"So. T'Lanois made the drawings of the shoreberry plants, and all the rest?"

"Precisely that. Meaning she was here."

"That's impossible," Liara said. "T'Lanois was lost on a research mission, well before the relay network was discovered.”

"And yet - here we have evidence that something she made returned to Thessia, either with or without her. "Shoreberries don't appear beyond asari space until a few hundred years before your mother’s birth. These drawings predate that by nearly two millennia. Someone in your government knew about the Prothean ruin."

“And so my—mother—“ Liara sometimes hesitated calling Benezia that, "wanted us to find the ruin. But didn't want to point us directly there."

"Exactly," EDI said. "A few years ago, a construction crew on the western end of the city dug up an Asari grave site. Thousands of years old. We never knew what to make of it."

"You never reported it to the Asari delegation." Liara thought a moment before she went on. "I'd say it was a wise move." Liara looked at the diagram of the Prothean ruin once more. "And there's no record of it, even in Asari governmental archives?"

"They've been scrubbed," EDI said. "If any mention was there, it's long gone now.” EDI turned and looked over the edge of the terrace, down toward the beach, where gentle waves, blown by the wind, rolled up the sand. “I don’t operate on speculation,” she said. 

“I try not to either,” Liara answered. “All the same, it appears my mother was afraid to reference the ruin directly. I wonder why.”

EDI nodded. She put her hands in her pockets. "I think we should visit the ruin, don't you?"


	21. Smoke and Mirrors

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nerai finds a friend onboard the mysterious ship that rescued her from certain death.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks, as always, to my editor RheasHelm, over at fanfiction.net.

They came out of the meld, both of them completely drained. Nerai fell almost immediately into a deep sleep, while Essa, herself exhausted, made an attempt to return to duty, though there wasn't much happening on the flight deck ever since they'd stopped relative to the installation, and were holding a steady five thousand kilometers away from it.

Essa went to her bag to try and sleep, but every time she closed her eyes, she woke with a shock. Each time she saw the dozens of dark figures again, resolving into asari in the dim light, hands touching her, as though she were Nerai being pulled to her feet. The shivering bodies, calling her sister, dragging her out of the room, telling her she wasn't allowed to go in there.  
Razia came and found her not much later. They went to the hold, where she demanded to know what Essa had seen.

"Don't worry," Essa told her. "Your operational details are all secure.”

"That's not what I'm worried about." Razia had a wild look in her eyes. She'd remained stuck in orbit, while Essa had led the planetary team, and she'd been acting oddly ever since they returned. She hid it well, but she wasn't comfortable with the confinement of the ship.

"What, then?" Essa asked.

"I want to know what happened to her up there.”

Essa let her hands float out in front of her. She began to explain.

#

After the initial shock, Nerai finally settled down, stopped trying to fight the other asari who were holding her, trying to keep her from hurting them or herself. Someone had brought a tray with food, it wasn't much, little squares of something like hardtack, that had to be sucked on for an hour or two before they could be chewed and swallowed.

When Nerai had quieted her hunger, she began to move around the quarters, where the other asari lived. They sat shivering in the dim light of a common room. Here they had spread out what belongings they had on the floor, marking out space for sleeping and sitting. It was cold enough that they slept in piles, their bodies spooned together to help retain heat. Nerai took off her enviro suit, and cleaned herself off, after so many days spent trapped inside it. But the air in the compartments was cold, and there was a constant draft. She decided to put it back on.

Someone told her to lie down, and eventually she slept. After so many days of napping here and there while leaning against a wall, a few hours of real rest felt like a luxury. She woke to a face hovering over hers, an asari about her size, strong and broad shouldered, wearing the gold and black patches of the merchant fleet. She had her arms wrapped around Nerai, but she wasn't sleeping. When Nerai woke she smiled and opened her tunic to show Nerai her tattoos. Then she took Nerai's hand in hers and held it to her breast. Did she want to...? No? Well, perhaps later. There wasn't much else to do, and one had to stay warm somehow.

Beyond the common sleeping room, there was another that contained a machine that dispensed the little squares of hardtack. In a third room they could get water, for drinking and for washing, though it was cold enough that almost no one wanted to brave the chill. The fourth room was the necessaries - Denni's word - a simple trough that followed the length of the far wall of the room. It was clean, Nerai said, given that so many sisters were using it, and for such a long time. She wanted to know who was responsible for taking care of it. No one, Denni told her. No one? They made it dirty, Denni explained, then it got clean. Nerai didn't understand, but there really wasn't any other way to explain it. Something cleaned it when no one was looking. Nerai wanted to know if they didn't maintain a watch through the night, just in case. In case of what? Good heavens she really was military, wasn't she? There was nothing here to harm her, Denni said. Everyone slept on the same schedule. They all seemed to get tired at the same time. And there were other things to worry about. Like what? Not now, Denni said. Not here.

Nerai went back to the control room. There was the Nixia, a little orange dot revolving around the second planet. Meanwhile, a second speck, moving fast, had completed its turn around the far side of the parent star, and was approaching the second planet from the other direction. It was coming from the day side, Nerai understood, and so would be hard for the Nixia's sensors to detect. And then she thought, nothing hides unless it needs to, and reached in to adjust the level of detail on the display.

The fast-moving object was making a close pass by the innermost gas giant, apparently in an effort to slingshot toward the interior of the system, when it came around the far side. Gauging by the speed, Nerai gathered this would happen within hours, not days. She wondered, too, how the Nixia had made such good time. She'd been gone a week, maybe eight days at most, and yet there they were, in low orbit around the second planet, the one that looked habitable. Perhaps the work that she'd done on the outside of the ship had paid off.

Nerai stepped back and as she did her fingers brushed against the edge of a console. Something gave her a powerful shock. When she pulled her hand away, there was a burn. A little blood leaked from her index finger, and there was a black mark that didn't rub off. She searched for what it was that she'd touched, but the console behind her had few features, aside from a small bulbous protrusion. Looking again, it seemed to hum and throb and crackle with energy. Nerai was backing away from it when Denni came to find her. There was a low rumbling sound passing through the ship.

“Come," Denni was saying, "It's time.”

Everyone was filing down the ramp, Denni and Nerai melting into the crowd. In the jostling they became separated; Denni called for Nerai to come find her afterward. After what?  
"You'll see!" Denni shouted, before being swarmed into the pack of bodies.

Nerai surveyed the crowd around her, looking at the gaunt faces, then at the ones pushing behind them, who were perhaps a little better fed. Where, she asked, was everyone from? How had they come to be here? She asked the one walking beside her.

The Asari shook her head. Her name was Urania. She'd been working in a mining operation in the outer belt, she said, surface drilling mostly. Their digger had found a pocket of gas, or perhaps some buried water-ice that had flash-boiled when their hot drill head hit it. Blew their rig clear off the rock they were on, and them with it. The drill operator had been killed outright, a fragment had ripped her helmet open. She and the other had been sent tumbling out into space, on divergent trajectories. For a while they could still see each other, and talk over their comm channel. After a few hours they were far enough apart that the other one was just a speck. The other one's suit had a leak, and she was starting to run out of air. Eventually they had gone out of comm range, and had tried to communicate by waving their arms and legs. Then, after a long time, Urania had started to run out of air, too. And then she'd woken up here.

How long ago had that been? Three months. How long had the others been trapped here? About as long. Some much longer. Years? Nerai asked. Yes, years. Those were the ones in back, pushing, according to Urania.

Eventually the pushing stopped, and they found themselves in one of the long galleries that ran the length of ship. Someone ordered for them to form a circle, and join hands. Even doing this, they hardly stretched halfway across the width of the space. The floor was covered in needles of frost that in melting turned the metal panels slick. The eaves of the gallery were draped with bundles of control cables and conduits.

The room shifted, or something turned Nerai's head, and looking back up she saw that some kind of object had appeared in the center of the room. Stubby, blunted, cone shaped, perhaps like the stinging bulb that she’d touched in the control room. This one had many indentations on its surface. It made no sound that Nerai could hear, but It drew her gaze like a magnet, and it seemed to shimmer in the low light of the gallery. Nerai was certain it hadn't been there a moment earlier. Had it been? She didn't think so, but perhaps she had been focused on other things.

The room went quiet, and then an unseen hand bent them all to their knees. Nerai felt that someone or something had entered the room, and was circling the edge of the ring they'd formed. Nerai looked up, but found her head turned away almost immediately, as though some part of her refused to look. What she saw was another, much like the rest of them, only larger, taller, the tentacles protruding from her head were longer, and projected out from her scalp like branches on a tree.

Someone cried out, "Goddess! Athame!" and the group - even Nerai - joined in. Her voice came without her willing it. The goddess might have answered, though in something like a stage whisper. There she was now, in the middle of their circle. The figure spun and threw its head back, stretching out its arms. "Children," it called out. Where her body should have been, was blinding light. Her face was a terrible ashen gray. The room tilted again. Each time this happened, time seemed to have passed without Nerai's noticing, because now, in an instant the hunger from earlier had returned, and she had a cramp in her back that only came on when she'd been crouching for an extended period.

The goddess was singing now, the final incantation from the Stone and the Pond. If she'd sung the whole thing, then she'd been going for a long time already, perhaps more than an hour. Nerai shivered and drew in a sharp breath. The goddess passed in front of her again, cloaked in light, a magical creature, but one that smelled vaguely of burning plastic, and scorched metal.  
Looking up, Nerai caught a glimpse of her face. Beads of light hung from her earlobes, and her eyes were black, though a flame seemed to burn within them. This was not Athame, at least not the way she was represented in the newer temples, but instead the old terror of Serrice, her lips drawn back over bared, pointed teeth, all rage, and demanding of sacrifice.

She was outside the circle now, walking around them in counterclockwise fashion and stopping here and there, examining her congregation, exchanging a word or two with them. At least once Nerai heard one of the Asari whisper, No, Mistress. Athame finally stopped behind Nerai where the goddess placed her hand on Nerai’s right shoulder. A cold hand, damp, and with nails like claws. There she was, the goddess, her breath on Nerai's neck, she could feel the goddess's face just behind her, almost touching, but not quite. So close, Nerai could tell that her mouth was open, could sense the dagger teeth behind those parted lips. The claw-nails clamped down on her shoulder again, and then released, and the goddess, if it was Athame, moved on down the line, placing her hand on the head of a lanky asari, a few bodies to the right of Nerai, wearing a tattered uniform from the mining colonies.

My charge, Athame declared, and the asari bowed her head and turned to go with Athame. As I asked Nidera to give her daughter to me, so I take one of you. But to you, I return one of mine!  
The circle opened, and as the sacrifice disappeared into the darkness of a passageway Nerai hadn't noticed before, someone else stepped forward to take her place: dark skinned, thick limbs and body, globes of light in its ears, and an impossibly thin neck. It was naked, this new creature, except for something mechanical that it wore around its waist.

Welcome the group said, and they joined hands again. The room tilted, and in an instant the new creature that was very much like an asari, but was also not one of them, had put on a new set of clothes, looking like a smaller though no less terrifying version of the goddess. There was a brief flash of heat, the air in the gallery blurred and the room spun. Nerai felt herself struggling to her feet as the world righted itself. The thing in the center of the gallery had disappeared, and Athame was gone.  
Everyone seemed to be recovering from some sort of shock. All but a few were sitting or crouching on the ground. Those who weren't stood in small groups, all of them holding each other and looking dazed. One or two lay unconscious on the floor while others attended to them.  
Nerai set out looking for Denni, but Denni found her first. There was her hand, cupped at the top of Nerai's hip; perhaps she was going to suggest that they skulk off somewhere, and frankly Nerai might have agreed given all she'd just seen. Instead Denni said, "Don't worry about it. In time you'll get used to our meetings with the goddess.”

"I don't think I want to," Nerai said. Denni shushed her and took her by the arm to one side of the long gallery.

"Wait for a minute," she said in a whisper. "This lot will clear out. The pushers don't care if you lag behind after a visitation."  
Nerai held her stomach, feeling for a moment like she might vomit. Denni handed her another square of the hardtack, virtually forcing it into Nerai's mouth. "You'll feel better," she whispered, and then, drawing Nerai over to the far wall, the two slipped behind an outcropping in the bulkhead. "We can wait here. I have something to show you.”

When the others had gone, Nerai asked, "What was that thing Athame brought with her?"  
"The sacrifice? One of us. Or used to be. Only she made her different, more like her. She's done it a few times, only they never last long. The ones that get taken down keep dying. I've seen three come and go so far.”

"What happens to them?”

"Fever maybe. They complain about something burning under their skin. They get really hot, then they die. I'm not a medic, you tell me.”

"No one really thinks that's Athame, do they?”

Denni shrugged. "We all have our own explanations, I guess.”

Denni had kept Nerai waiting behind the projection in the bulkhead for a good ten minutes after the others had left. Now though, she reached out and took Nerai's arm. They moved slowly across the gallery floor, leaving twin trails of footprints on the damp floor panels. It wasn't until then that Nerai realized Denni was barefoot.

"How did you end up here?" she asked.

Denni shook her head. She didn't quite know. "We were running a load into Janiri's low orbit station. Our ship was optimized for aerobrake. It's a tough maneuver, but a good pilot can pull it off no problem. I'm just a deckhand so I was in my bunk. If you wanted they could dope you for the maneuver, but I usually could sleep through it on my own. Done it a dozen times already, so I was racked out, and lucky as anything I was right next to my rescue gear. Anyhow, the brake depends on your heat shield. Ours was one of those parabolic domes. Damned thing cracked right in half.”

"Heat shields don't just shatter like that," Nerai said. "Do you know how it happened?”

"Didn't stick around to find out. I was halfway to the launch by the time they were ordering us to abandon. When I decoupled the launch, the ship was already in a dozen pieces and starting to skip off the upper atmosphere.”

"So you saw?”

Denni nodded. "A little. No one could have survived a ship coming apart like that. Least that's what I tell myself at night. Anyhow, I ran for altitude. Not much fuel on board the launch. During a maneuver like that, there shouldn't have been any. I got as high as I could, almost to a stable orbit, and then sent out a beacon.”

"Our ship heard it. We were too far away to do anything.”

Denni only shrugged. "Doesn't matter. I got picked up, got to live another day. You don't always get so lucky." Nerai nodded. That was true enough.

They had reached another opening, at the other end of the gallery now, not the one Athame had used, but much like it. Denni said, "It's dark in there, so stick with me." Nerai gave a nod and followed her in, one hand on the belt of Denni's tunic, just in case it was too dark to see.  
The ramp went down for several decks, bending to the right and left, and leading into corridors that had only locked doors, or were blocked entirely with machinery. At one point, about halfway down, Denni grabbed Nerai, clamped her hand over her mouth, and dragged her into the shadows. Nerai struggled for a moment but Denni was stronger than she looked.

“The goddess comes down here sometimes,” she whispered. "I'm not sure if she knows we're here, but she seems to be looking all the same.”

 

From where they were, Athame emerged into the low light. Her bright cloak had disappeared, revealing that underneath she was naked. Her skin was pale as ashes. Her face had a strong brow, and a prominent nose and chin. Her fingers were thick, and each hand had a hard band of metal at the wrist. Around her neck was a series of small, circular indentations that seemed to be filled with ingots of metal that were wired together. She wore a mechanical-looking belt draped around her waist. There were other odd things about her. Her elbows seemed to bend in the wrong direction, and she wobbled a little on feet that seemed much to small for her frame. Denni tightened her grip on Nerai, for no other reason than she herself was terrified. They had pressed themselves into the seam between two large pieces of machinery, where it was good and dark. If Nerai had been trying to evade a normal enemy, she'd have been certain she wouldn't be seen. But the goddess's eyes were different, black holes, behind which a tender flame burned, and they seemed to see everything. All Nerai could do was watch as the goddess looked in their direction, passed over them and apparently decided to move on, up the ramp toward the main chamber.  
They waited a few more minutes to make sure she was gone, then continued on their path, ever downward.

Eventually they came to a place where the floor leveled out again, and there was a little more light. Here they found were several doorways leading off the main corridor, one to something that looked like a machine shop, with a massive piece of equipment hanging on an odd-looking chain. In the next, several boxes with body-shaped indentations stood against the wall. Each was filled with a soft, clear gel that was soft to the touch, but turned hard when Nerai struck it with her fist. Everything in the room was covered in a fine layer of ash. Then another compartment with a row of chairs with arm and leg restraints, and metal hooks mounted into a rack suspended overhead. Stains on the floor might have been blood.

"When did you find this?”

"Right after I got here," Denni said. "I'm not the type to listen too hard when someone says not to go exploring.”

"Have you shown this to anyone else?”

"No one." Denni ran a hand over her head and shivered. "No one wants to know what's going on here.”

The last exit was an airlock, and inside it a massive open space, a hangar, with dozens of teardrop-shaped ships, suspended from davits mounted in the ceiling. The area was so big that whatever was above them seemed to vanish into a thin gray fog. There was a steady wind, too, blowing from the far end of the space.

"What is this?" Nerai asked.

"They're ships, aren't they?" Denni had switched on a nearby control panel, and the hatch of one of he craft slid open. "Here," she said. "Let me show you." They went through the hatch, where they found a pair of seats facing a bank of panels that might have been instruments and controls.

"Can you fly it?”

"Maybe." Denni looked back at Nerai. "I was hoping you could.”

"Are there any pilots among the sisters?”

"Only one I know is the girl who just came back during the ritual. No one comes back from a sacrifice wanting to help anyone else out." Denni had crawled over to the left chair, and was touching buttons, trying to see what they did. After a moment the console chirped and something came to life. A series of blue and green lights appeared, readouts of some kind that appeared to show the ship's status. The different systems lit up, starting out red, then changing to green. "That's never happened before.”

"Looks like you've found the mains," Nerai said. She gestured for Denni to move aside and examined the two seats. Situated in the armrest of each chair was a set of what appeared to be restraints, meant to lock wrist and elbow in place. More straps came out of the chair itself to hold down the pilot's body. But then there seemed to be a bit of movement permitted by the wrist shackles. Those were the controls, she realized, most likely meant to be used during heavy acceleration.

Meanwhile Denni had climbed through a hatch situated behind the two pilots' chairs, and was motioning for Nerai to follow. Passing through the hatch they found a second area, built like a well. Down below them, dozens of coffin-like cases stood in ranks. Most of them were already closed, though they appeared empty. One or two were partway open. Each was packed with a gel-like substance, like the ones they'd seen earlier. It appeared they were meant to seal around a body and protect it from the shock of a hard landing. Nerai tried to open one of the sealed containers, but could find no mechanism to release the object's lid.

"These must be troop carriers," Nerai said, suddenly understanding. How many dozen more ships were there in this bay? Five? Six? This massive ship, she realized, could drop thousands of soldiers onto a planet in a matter of minutes.

"So where are the troops?" Denni asked. Nerai only shook her head. The question frightened her. They climbed down farther into the ship, where they found another layer of coffins.  
"How many in here, do you think?" Denni said. "Two hundred?”

"Packed tight as they are, I'd say so.”

Looking up, Nerai saw they wouldn't be able to climb back to the cockpit, so they found a secondary hatch and used it to get back out onto the loading ramp.

While Denni returned to the ramp, Nerai climbed as far down the rigging as she dared, trying to see what was underneath the ship, finding what ultimately looked to be a launch tube. Meanwhile Denni shuddered and danced nervously on the catwalk above. "Come on, huntress," she said. "We need to get out of here.”

Nerai began climbing back up, though now she wanted to see the release mechanism from the davit above them. "Aren't you curious?" she said to Denni as she went past.

Denni only shook her head, and said, "Don't you feel the chill?”

"It is drafty," Nerai agreed. Suddenly her finger throbbed, and a little drop of blood appeared. She licked it away and continued upward. She'd nearly reached the top of the ship, when Denni began hurrying away, toward the blast doors.

Nerai slid down from her perch, ran after Denni, and grabbed her.

"We need to get off this ship," Nerai said.

"And go where?" Denni was visibly trembling now.

“Home."

Denni's eyes were wide. She squeezed her eyes shut, as though trying to banish a thought, and finally said, "None of us are going home.”

"What's your malfunction, deckhand?”

Denni pulled away. "And all the others?" She began hurrying toward the doors again.  
"We don't have room for them." Denni shook her head, not understanding. She gestured up at the troop carrier. Clearly there was room. "On my ship. We're already almost full. There's no room for them.”

"But you have room for me?" Denni whispered. Nerai nodded. Denni softened. "How do you plan to get us out of here, then?”

"You've seen the display, haven't you?" Nerai asked. Denni nodded. "So you've seen where we are? That Thessia is long behind us. And that there' s another ship here?”

"I have."

"I wasn't picked up until we reached this system," Nerai said. "If we can get to my ship, we can get home.”

They'd nearly reached the blast doors they'd come through when a terrible sound from the corridor stopped them. Denni grabbed Neerai's shoulder, and pulled her back. "There's another door at the far end.”

There was another shout, and a swell of noise from the corridor. It sounded like someone had shouted How dare you. They weren't going to be out of sight before whatever was out there found them. Nerai grabbed Denni by the arm and pulled her up the loading ramp and into the ship. They clambered up to the cockpit. There were no windows, but with the power on, a number of screens began projecting views the area surrounding the ship.  
Something was happening just inside the dark archway of the blast doors. Nerai scanned the other screens. From here she could see another doorway. She imagined that an area this large might have multiple entrances, in particular if loading troops in good order was of any importance. After a moment the goddess emerged from both doorways.

"Are we looking at the same thing from two different angles?”

Denni shook her head. “See? There's a marking there on the wall that's not by the other one."  
Both goddesses took another step forward, and as they did, behind each another copy emerged. Denni shrunk back from the screens. Her voice was a whisper now. "We have to go. We have to get out of here.”

A total of six copies of the goddess had emerged from either doorway, and were slowly making their way along the edges of the hangar. One of them had stopped, and she seemed to be studying the control panel in the entry.

"She's looking for us," Nerai said, her voice calm and steady. Within, her stomach churned and her heart raced and then steadied and even seemed to stop, just as it had on the Armali salient, when she'd taken aim on that first enemy officer and fired a bullet through her throat.

The controls, as far as Nerai could tell, were much more minimal than they might have been on a traditional asari ship. The pitch, yaw, and roll controls were likely mated to the cuffs mounted in the seat, but now she was looking for a way to uncouple from the davits above and load her ship into the launch tube.

Denni kept watching the displays. The goddesses were stomping around outside, everywhere. A good dozen of them now, while a thirteenth continued to carefully examine the control panel. Nerai watched the goddess push a button. Suddenly the a revolving light inside the room began to flash, and a klaxon began to sound. Behind the goddess the blast doors began to close.  
"Do you see what's happening?" Denni said. "I think she wants to vent the hangar."  
That didn't make any sense, Nerai thought. Certainly it would kill her, too, wouldn't it? The klaxon masked the sound of the goddess shouting to herself outside, but Nerai could hear them shrieking How dare you? She felt another gust of wind.

"We haven't closed the hatch," she said, her voice barely a whisper.

"What?" Denni said, but already Nerai had thrown herself from the left seat, and was leaping for the opening. Just outside two goddesses stood, their eyes aflame, their claw hands reaching. One of them had half her arm inside the door already. Nerai kicked the closer one in the knee, a sharp blow that would have stopped a normal enemy cold. The goddess shrieked in pain, and lashed out with her claws, cutting Nerai across the cheek. The other one reached for her, grabbing her by the collar, and pulling her out onto the ramp. Nerai smashed her elbow across the bridge of that one's nose, and she staggered back against the railing and let Nerai drop to the floor. Nerai hurled herself back through the hatch, shouting at Denni. "Get us unhooked!”

Denni nodded and began fumbling with a set of controls positioned above the two pilots' chairs.  
The first goddess was after her now, slashing with her open hands. One of the blows connected and ripped out a section of Nerai's sleeve, without hitting her flesh. Still she staggered to her left, and fell against the bulkhead.

Suddenly the ship dropped away from the ramp. One of the goddesses fell into the space below the ship. The other had forced her hands and feet into the entryway of the hatch, and was holding herself there, preparing to climb inside. How dare you? she shrieked again, and Nerai lashed out at her, using her knees and elbows and driving the goddess back enough for her to reach out and pull the lever beside the hatch. It slid shut with a terrible grinding sound, as the goddess's left arm was severed, halfway between elbow and wrist. The limb fell to the deck, leaking black-colored blood. The ship rocked again. If Nerai understood the display properly, they were seated in their launch tube now.

With the hatches shut, they could no longer hear the klaxon, or the shouts of the goddesses, who were swarming the outside of the ship. Nerai counted perhaps twenty of them. Some were climbing down from the chain that held the ship. Others were leaping onto the hull from the loading ramp. Their fists made an impotent thumping sound on the hull.

"Do you think they can get in?" Denni said.

"Let's not stick around to find out.”

Nerai got into the left chair again and flipped the next lever. There was no immediate response, though something on the panel lit up, and there was noise from below, like a reactor powering up. Pulling next two levers gave the same result. The goddesses redoubled their pounding, for all the good it did, tearing at the hull with their bare hands. Denni flipped another series of switches.  
At first nothing happened, then the panel gave a different sound, a kind of low roar. Several icons on the board lit up red, turned yellow, then green, and suddenly the bottom dropped out of the world as the ship roared out into space.

#

Razia hadn't moved. Essa had been talking for hours now. At last she let out a sigh and said, "That's all you saw?”

"That's all," Essa answered. She slipped out of the restraints on her seat. Razia was looking at the far bulkhead, apparently lost in thought.

"What do you think we're dealing with?" she asked.

Essa kept quiet. When the captain is in doubt, she does not speak.

Neela had been taking notes the whole time. She suddenly looked up. "Where was the crew of this ship?”

"There wasn't one, as far as Nerai saw. Everything seems to be automated.”

"And yet, the ship she used to escape was rigged for pilots roughly our size," Neela said. "It almost sounded like the ship was capturing unlucky souls and putting them to work on board.”

Essa only shook her head. "I'll leave you to watch over Nerai," she said to Razia. "Keep me posted on her condition." Razia said that she would, before leaving for the med bay. 

Essa left the cargo hold and returned to the flight deck to see how things were going. The ship was holding position five thousand kilometers away from the installation. So far no signals had gone between it and the ship. For the moment Essa wanted it to stay that way.

She returned to the crew deck an hour later, where she found Neela chewing on one of Orie's berries. They had enough of them to last more than two weeks. Essa looped her feet into a set of straps alongside Neela.

Neela swallowed what she was eating and said, “Razia can tell you were lying to her.”  
Essa nodded. “For the moment she’s not sure of I'm hiding from her.”

"What is it?" Neela said.

"That they knew," Essa answered.

Neela tilted her head, not sure how to take what Essa had said. In the shifting of the light, the diadem markings on her face became much more clear. “Knew what?”

"Everything," Essa said. “They knew what those installations are for. And I think Nerai knows how to get us home."


	22. The Serpent and the Vanguard

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Liara and EDI explore an old prothean ruin, previously discovered by the crew of the Nixia, where Liara learns more about the history and purpose of the site.

The Serpent and the Vanguard

Mason had attempted to contact Liara after he'd fled. Liara was growing accustomed to seeing such messages. They usually fell into one of three categories: the fools who gloated that, now that they were free of Liara's shackles and restrictions, they would rise and become more powerful than she could ever imagine; the contrite, who begged for mercy, or attempted to plead that they'd been coerced into betraying her; and a third kind, where the traitor attempted to shift blame onto one of Liara's other associates. Mason's was the third kind.

He'd been running for all of two days, and he already looked like hell. He had done nothing to hide the fact that he'd landed on Omega, which was both desperate and smart. Liara couldn't come after him directly, not after Aria's attempted assassination, and desperate because Mason was soft in ways that on Omega would likely get him killed, in particular if he tried to barter information for favor with Aria.  
"Doctor," Mason said, not quite looking at the screen. His gaze was turned toward something just below eye level, perhaps as though he'd written a script so he'd remember to cover all the usual points. He'd gone to one of Omega's public messaging terminals, where a person could insert a number of different backgrounds behind them. He'd chosen the default image, a picture of the Omegan skyline, the vast open central gallery of the station, with the many different spokes and keels hanging down from above and rising up from below. Sickly orange light bathing the towers from the ball of liquid sodium, contained by a magnetic field, and kept constantly at a boil by a massive particle beam built by the Protheans who long ago had settled there. The Salt Star they called it. It was the view the wealthy on Omega got to enjoy. If one could, in fact, enjoy it.

"I understand you're only doing what you have to," Mason said, "but... I... the leak. It wasn't me." He paused to cough. The dirty air on the station wasn't going to help his aging lungs. Liara gave him six months. A year if he could avoid getting sick. Mason wiped the sweat from his face and then said, "Look, you've got no reason to believe me. And it's true that I was spying on you. But it was for your own protection. You have to believe me. How long have we known each other?" He coughed again and then went on, "I have my suspicions as to who it might be. I know you won't listen to me directly, but I know you're smart. You'll figure it out." Mason stopped and, for the first time, looked directly at the camera, and thus directly at Liara. She knew, of course, what was coming next, the thinly veiled threat, and there it was, right on cue. "I have, of course, taken precautions, in the event that you do decide to pursue me. I know you're well aware of the sort of damage I could do to the... to your organization." He looked down, then back up at the camera, and said, "I've also left a package for you on the Citadel. No need to go looking for it. It'll come find you, next time you're there." One last pause. Mason looked up, directly at her again, and said, "Goodbye, Doctor.”

Liara flipped closed the screen on her omni-tool, and climbed out of the shuttle. EDI was standing on the apron of the spaceport, while several drones loaded some specialized equipment onto the shuttle that would take them to the dig.  
"Bad news?" EDI said. Liara shrugged. It was neither good nor bad.

Varian and Alera were helping with the crates, but Liara took the Turian aside and said, "I need to talk to you." He nodded and followed her around the far side of her ship, where a running generator blocked out the sound of their conversation.  
She said, "The man who betrayed me will be able to blow your cover." Varian simply nodded and listened as she explained the rest. He seemed almost relieved by the time she'd finished. "There's no simple solution," she told him. "We can't fake your death again.”

"Right. Cry wolf, and all that."  
"Exactly."  
"I could just go back to being myself."  
"You likely wouldn't last long if you did."  
"Of course," Varian said. "But wouldn't it be nice to let me pretend that it were? Even for just a moment?"  
Liara patted Varian on the shoulder. "You'll be safe with me. That's the only promise I can make."  
"Your idea of safety is somewhat looser than mine," Varian said.  
"So it is." Liara turned away from him, and went to find EDI, who had finished loading the shuttle.

#

On their way tot he dig site, Varian seemed to come alive again, bombarding EDI with questions. EDI, for her part, answered with the unshakable patience of an artificial life form, even when it came to Joker. Had she really loved a human being? She had. How did she even know that she was a woman? Was it part of her programming? EDI had smiled, seeming to shock Varian with a suddenly organic gesture. 

“I’d never really thought about what I was, until Jeff came along,” she told him. “I don’t think he really cared what I was. We were both aware of how—unconventional—our relationship was. In the end, we had to fight to be together, no matter what form I took on. I like to think he preferred the body I’m in now.”

The shuttle slowed and began its descent. Two drones, male-bodied units dressed in utility gear stood in the doorway and looked down. EDI said, "There's no good place to land. We'll need to enter through the skylight."  
They extended a rig and dropped a weighted cable into the hole. EDI went first, then Liara. The others followed. The line swayed as they came through the opening, the shuttle roaring as it hovered twenty meters above. The edges of the skylight seemed to have been melted by something.  
Liara hit the ground hard enough to slip on the water-slick rock, and EDI had to help her up. Varian was next. He began lighting glow cubes and tossing them around their landing zone.  
All around them was the sound of roaring water. As Liara's eyes adjusted, she saw a dozen spillways, water churning around the edges of the gallery. The space was fifty meters deep at is center, and even deeper around the edges. EDI deployed a small swarm of mapping drones that sped off in ten different directions.  
"Well," Varian said. "Shall we have the Prothean expert tell us what to look for?"  
"This will go faster if we split up,” Liara said, showing them each an image of Benezia's markings.  
EDI and Varian came with her while Alera split off with two of the other EDIs.  
Liara's path took her down over a ledge. When she reached the ground below, she found places where molten metal had cooled. As the others clambered down to reach her, she was already smashing pieces of it away with a hammer.  
EDI knelt down, the lights on her harness casting strange shadows across the wall behind them. "What is that?" she asked.  
“Nazarite,” Liara answered. "Reaper cannons fire a stream of liquid metal. Once it's been exposed to the elements, it usually looks like this.” She held up the fist-sized block she'd chopped off the floor. "It's an alloy of iron, uranium and tungsten. Sometimes there's lead, too, depending on the site. I used to find it at Prothean ruins sometimes."  
"It's radioactive?" Varian said. He took a step back.  
"Not very." Liara set the lump of metal down. "If these ruins are Prothean, then it's fifty thousand years old."  
"I've found pockets of the material elsewhere," EDI added. "It seems to have been poisoning the forests surrounding the city. There are remnants of an older settlement a few kilometers south of here. They appeared to have been abandoned." 

Liara had fed a sample of the metal into a small case she carried on her back. It whirred and hummed for a minute or two, then fed an analysis to the screen of her omni-tool. 

“That’s odd,” she said. EDI looked at the information and nodded. 

"Radiometric dating would seem to indicate that this Nazarite is considerably younger than the presumed date of the Prothean extinction.”

“Layman’s terms, please?” Varian said.

“The proportions of radioactive isotopes in the uranium are significantly higher than samples taken from the end of the prothean extinction,” EDI said. “This material is thousands of years younger than anything found at other sites.”  
“This is certainly unexpected," Liara said.  
"Someone care to tell me what's going on?" Varian asked. He had moved to the other end of the ledge, where the ground dropped away again to a broader terrace, strewn with rubble.  
"I'm sure you learned about the Prothean extinction in school."  
"I did," Varian said.  
"Then you know they were wiped out fifty thousand years ago."  
"Give or take."  
"And there were other civilizations that existed before the Prothean empire that shared similar characteristics with them, and with us."  
"How does that explain this?" Varian asked, gesturing vaguely. He crouched down on the lip of the ledge and touched his shoulder, then his waistband. Liara thought it an odd bit of body language, until she realized he was instinctively feeling for a weapon. His mandibles flexed and flicked with nervous energy.  
"We're in no danger," she said. "But this site doesn’t fit with the old theories I’ve developed. If it is a newer site, that means that at least a small contingent of Protheans survived the invasion, and persisted into our cycle.  
"So they didn't all die out?"  
"Some survived," Liara said. "Some lived through the invasion in stasis. We found a few thousand failed pods in an underground sanctuary on Ilos. During the invasion, we discovered a living prothean on Eden Prime, who had survived the war in a functional pod. He was meant to serve as the leader of an army that would wake after the invasion and reconquer the galaxy. There were several other sites where I found evidence of similar preparations, all failed. And I translated a data disk that contained details of projects on at least two colony worlds that were to contain massive bunkers. What I've never seen is something like this. A buried, living city. The water would have kept it cool enough to mask their activity, I imagine."  
EDI said, "The drones have located a number of natural caverns at the edges of this installation, as well as an ancient sewer system. It appears that whoever built this place began digging from those locations, using hand tools."  
They slid down the edge of the next terrace and continued on to the edge of the next. The mapping drones had finished their first circuit through the ruin and were already regrouping at the landing site to head out for a second pass.  
As they went, Varian asked, "So you're saying the Protheans tried to wait out their own extinction?"  
But Liara didn't hear him. They had reached the outer wall, and there was the shadow of a body. She shined her light on it, panning back and forth. She was so enthralled that she didn't realize that Varian had been calling her name for almost a minute before he finally got her attention by grabbing her hand.  
"Liara," he said, "We found your marking."  
Liara was quiet. Then she said, "Thank you, Varian." She pointed, "Here, look at this."  
He stared, his head tilted to the left, a sign of concentration in Turians. "Burn shadow," he said. "I've seen pictures. They were all over Cipritine. They say you could tell where the big reaper ships attacked by how many of these marks you could find. Some places there were so many it was a wall of greasy black soot. Some of my ants and uncles—“ he stopped a moment, “—on my father's side. They have some pictures they took themselves, from those days."  
Just beside the shadow was Benezia's mark: 303. Beneath it was a drain, where water from the spillways emptied into a hole about a meter wide.  
"You don't suppose it's down there?" Varian said.  
"I do." Liara was already buckling herself onto a rope.  
They regrouped with Alera and the other EDIs who attached bolts to the rock and fed Liara's ropes through the metal loops. Liara clipped her harness on and prepared to descend. Varian stood at the top of the drain, lighting several glow cubes and throwing them down the hole.  
Liara plunged in, her mouth and nose filling with water. She gagged and shoved herself away from the wall as she descended, and eventually the stream scattered, so that she could breathe well enough. Her lights glimmered on the wet rock, the roar of the water drowning out the scrape of her boots and the creak of the rope. The walls of the drain were smooth from the action of the water, but one still saw traces of the tools that had carved out the shaft.  
After rappelling down a few dozen meters, she found a fist-sized hole drilled into the wall, and inside the hole was sealed package. Liara tucked it into her belt, and descending to the floor of the tube, where the sheets of water gathered into a boiling pool at the bottom of the pit. From there it continued down a horizontal tube nearly as tall as she was. She didn't understand how, but it seemed there was a little green smoke pooling at the far end of the pipe.  
"EDI," she said into the radio. "Can you still hear me?"  
"I can, Doctor."  
"Good. I'm going off the line. There's something down here I want to check out."  
She unclipped her harness and went forward. The water was knee deep and flowing fast. The floor of the tube was nearly smooth, with a thumb-deep layer of sand and pebbles at the very bottom. It was freezing here, despite the heat at the surface, and it wasn't long before Liara lost sensation in her fingers.  
"Doctor," EDI said. "Our shuttle is reporting incoming inclement weather. Additional water may fill your location before you can get out."  
"Understood, EDI,” she said, though she continued on down the tunnel anyhow. The water level seemed to hold steady. The air was filled with spraying mist.  
After a hundred meters, the pipe pitched down at a sharp angle, and Liara tumbled over a low waterfall. She caught her balance and kept moving. For a moment she lost sight of the green smoke, then spotted it again. The pipe, she realized had split in half, and she raised herself up onto a ledge above that led to a partially concealed secondary tunnel.  
Here the ground was mostly dry and covered with a faint coating of dust and sand. There were no footprints. Had Benezia come this far? she wondered. And if so, would a few centuries really have erased any sign of her visit?  
Up ahead, Liara saw a greenish shimmer on the rock somewhere toward the end of the tunnel. She followed it for another two hundred meters, and the farther in she went, the more she heard a faint tick-tick over the radio as static cut through her connection to the others. The tunnel smelled of ancient dust, a familiar odor from the ruins Liara had visited as a student, or later discovered on digs of her own.  
The tunnel ended and she found herself in a circular room, not very big and not very high. In the center of the space were five chairs, each arranged at a display, and in each chair the skeletal and partially mummified remains of a prothean. There was a little circle of light on the floor, and Liara looked up to see that the hole aligned with the one in the ceiling above. In the center of the room was a star shaped pit, about half a meter deep, where the a small portion of a reaper bolt had struck the ground and shattered into thousands of deadly fragments. The blast had killed all of the Protheans instantly, decapitating the one nearest the impact and leaving the others riddled with fragments.  
Liara avoided touching the remains. It was rare to find even partial skeletons, but ones that had been left exposed to the elements like this would likely collapse into powder if disturbed, like the one she'd accidentally bumped during her first year of her doctoral work. If she was going to preserve them, they would need to be sprayed with resin, and the resin would need time to set before they could be moved. There was no time for that now. Instead she settled on taking video of the site, being careful not to touch anything for the moment.  
It was all very odd. The way the chairs were arranged, it appeared to be set up in a manner much like the bridge of a starship. No one had ever seen an intact Prothean vessel, though Liara had led a team that had discovered a corvette-class vessel that had been shot in half in battle in the Anjelik system. They'd found the bridge partially intact. The equipment and technology seemed to be similar to what she'd found on that ship, which is to say, from the late invasion period. High tech, but cheaply fabricated, and according to Javik, often unreliable. Protheans, in a constant war of attrition with the reapers, had settled for mass production over quality.  
It appeared the creatures that had built this place had removed the gear from a working vessel, and reconstructed it here. Everywhere there were tubes and conduits, connecting the different arrays to each other. One, Liara could tell, was a passive scanning device that could detect the magnetic fields created by a ship. There was another station that appeared to be a commander's post. The remaining three seats were arranged around a communications array, which, because it was Prothean, worked on very different principles than on most other ships. At the center of the console was a small beacon, while the three operators sat with their hands pressed flat to the console. In a sense, there was little difference between the operator and the terminal; according to Javik the operator, his function, and the station where he worked were considered to be one and the same. There'd been a fire when the bolt had pierced the control room, and their flesh had melted into the tar-like material of the panel.  
Liara checked the beacon to see if it was inactive. It had not suffered much structural damage in the attack and subsequent fire, but it could have a residual charge left over. She panned her lights up and down the flat object. There was a faint handprint in the layer of dust. Five fingers. Benezia had been there. 

Her mother should have known better than to touch it. Even a device with a minimal charge could knock a person unconscious. All the same the object seemed to want her to interact with it. Liara removed a device from her utility belt. The beacon was in fact partially active and the device would make a partial record of the object's contents without compelling Liara to interact with it. She waited a few minutes before the device made a sound and then demagnetizing itself fell to the ground. Liara picked it up and took the interface in her hand, which allowed her to see what was on the beacon.

#

Liara was sitting at the edge of the tunnel now, having finished viewing the beacon's contents, but she was thinking about something she'd said to Shepard, during the war. They'd been in Shepard's cabin, Liara's head tucked comfortably on the Commander's shoulder, and their hands laced together. "It would be easy for a single ship to get lost up there," she'd said, looking out the commander's viewport. They could, she'd argued, find an out of the way planet, start their own settlement, perhaps scuttle the Normandy, abolish all trace of their technological footprint. She hadn't really meant it, of course. It was just a thought, just something that passed through a person's mind, in particular when faced with what looked like unsurvivable odds. In the end, Shepard hadn't survived. Or at least no one had ever found a body, not after a year of searching in the ruins of London and aboard the shattered Citadel. Sometimes Liara wished that Shepard had said yes.  
These Protheans, though, had done just that. Not on purpose. The first records on the beacon were from a massive battle over the planet Tranbir 9, a holding action in support of a desperate attempt to tow their partially constructed Crucible to a safe location. Instead it, and most of the fleet - nearly five hundred ships of the line, along with assorted support craft, tenders and tugs - had been lost.  
The Winged Serpent, the ship from which this beacon had ultimately been taken, was a torpedo frigate, not unlike the Normandy, meant to lurk at the edges of a battle, waiting to destroy larger capital ships. It had been ordered away from the action, to deliver a report to a larger fleet, waiting two jumps away. They didn’t arrive in time.  
Reaching their appointed rendezvous coordinates, they’d been witness to the aftermath of another, even larger battle. The armada, including the fleet's flagship, the Penumbra Ascending, had been reduced to a high-velocity debris field. Unsure what to do, the crew of the Winged Serpent had found what few survivors they could and taken them aboard. And on a nearby planet, they’d discovered the crew and passengers of a downed freighter. In a few weeks, they had amassed a small flotilla of seven ships, most of them damaged, five out of those unarmed civilian craft. After about a month spent evading a trio of smaller reaper craft that they referred to as skirmishers, they had arrived at the planet that would come to be known as Tiptree.  
They had sought this location because there had been a colony here before, one that was small enough simply to have been destroyed from orbit. Now the ruins were more than a century old, and so the survivors had come to a radical conclusion. They would land, build an underground colony, and wait out the invasion.  
And so the civilians were deposited planetside, where they were put to work digging a shelter. Meanwhile the Winged Serpent, the ship with the least physical damage, was dispatched on two missions. The first involved placing a limpet device on the mass relay to watch for the arrival of incoming ships, and to transmit their relative mass to a passive listening station on the planet itself. The second mission was to go out and find other survivors, and convince them to come to Tiptree. For the Protheans, the war was over. Their only good chance of winning had been destroyed over Tranbir 9. There were only two options left—hide or die.  
The Winged Serpent had traveled the galaxy for close to fifteen years, logging the destruction, which, even after the most recent reaper invasion, was hard for Liara to take in. There was a cloud of debris so large in the Indrilla system, that an observer on the surface of one of the inner planets could see a visible darkening of the sun that lasted nearly a week, and cooled the atmosphere so much that sometimes snow would fall in the middle of summer. Dozens of garden worlds were simply on fire, massive conflagrations that had turned entire continents to pits of ash.  
They had flown on, risking their lives, searching for survivors. Returning to Tiptree, after one too many close calls, they had landed the craft in the deep water just off the headland not far from Morrow.  
And the Protheans of Tiptree had endured. In a century, their population had gone from three hundred and forty one to just under seven thousand. By the time they celebrated their first millennium of existence, their population had leveled off at around a hundred thousand or so. And they had managed to persist and thrive - if Liara had understood the dates correctly - for well over fifteen thousand years beyond the reaper invasion.  
The reapers were gone. The listening post, so busy during the first century of its existence, hadn't heard a signal in thousands of years. After several generations of council meetings, they had decided to retrieve the Winged Serpent from its hiding spot, and send it through the relay to search for signs of other survivor and to scavenge. 

It never returned, though it did send messages echoed throughout the galaxy, and eventually reached Tiptree. They had made it to the Citadel without incident, they said. They'd found signs, ancient now, that some of their species had survived the invasion, and had lived for a brief period on the Citadel. They had visited two dozen other systems and found no sign of any other survivors. New civilizations were rising on other planets. They had arrived to find the Citadel partially rebuilt by the keepers, and had set up camp to scout for resources.  
Then there was a second message, dated a few days later, that they were evacuating the Citadel with all possible haste, and that they were being pursued by an unknown vessel. The transmission ended with the words, Do not attempt to contact us. Do not attempt to find us. We are lost.  
Not long after, perhaps a hundred years later, a vessel had passed through the relay, massive in size, and the colony had stopped all activity in the hopes their shelter might go unnoticed. For a week nothing had happened, though observers reported seeing a new star appear on the horizon at morning. And then all of a sudden, death arrived with a deafening roar. There was a frantic scramble to evacuate. Too late. The ceiling burst open in a blaze of liquid fire, and the colony and all its inhabitants had been erased.  
Meanwhile the damaged beacon had gone on logging data. For thousands upon thousands of years there was nothing, and then, twenty five hundred years ago, a very large ship, and then a relatively small one had passed through the relay within a few hours of each other.  
About two and a half weeks later, the smaller ship had departed again, and shortly afterward the much larger ship had departed, too. Then centuries of quiet, until about seven hundred years ago, around the time Benezia would have arrived, a small exploratory craft had arrived. There were no further records of arrivals or departures. The limpet device had been suspiciously deactivated.

#

Liara returned to the rest of her group. She didn't bother mentioning the beacon as of yet. Varian was looking around nervously, as was Alera, who had produced a weapon from somewhere. Through the hole in the ceiling of the shelter, Liara saw that the sky had gone dark, and rainwater was pouring down in wrist-thick streams, along with leaves and dirt and other debris.  
"Where's the shuttle?" Liara asked.  
Varian and Alera were quiet. EDI looked at Liara and said, "Five minutes before your return, someone detonated an EMP device in the upper atmosphere directly above Morrow. For the moment, most of my drones are inoperable. The shuttle appears to have crashed somewhere nearby after its pilot became incapacitated."  
"What are our options?"  
"Aside from your associate, we are unarmed," EDI said. "I would suggest we make our exit as quickly as we can. There is a tunnel to the south."  
"What other choice to we have?" Varian asked.  
"Stand and fight?" Alera said.  
"Our chances of surviving an engagement with an unknown kind and number of hostiles is significantly less than one tenth of one percent," EDI said.  
"She always do that?" Varian asked.  
“She does," Liara said. After she'd thought for a moment, she said, "Did the drones find any other exits?"  
"To the west, there is a similar tunnel."  
"We'll go that way," Liara said. "I suspect anyone who would mount an attack like this might already know about the southern exit."  
"Who do you think it is?"  
"I have a long, long list of enemies," Liara said. "Take your pick."  
Something roared overhead, the whine of a dropship decelerating overhead. Then a second one.  
"We need to move," EDI said. "Follow me."


	23. Other Suns

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Nixia travels to a new star system.

Other Suns  
Nerai was awake. Essa went below decks to see her in med bay. She found Razia hovering over her. Nerai had climbed out of bed and removed most of her bandages. Her hands were looking fairly well healed from the burns. She was showing Razia something she'd drawn on an erasable board, which, when Essa asked to see what it was, turned out to be an incredibly detailed diagram of boxes connected to each other by a number of variously colored lines. It reminded her of a diagram of the Nixia's power grid crossed with a map of the Armali public transit authority.  
She studied it for a moment, then felt as though someone had pinched her hard on the back of her neck. She realized she'd seen it before, during the meld. When Nerai had been shocked by the console, she'd had the image stamped into her mind. Essa handed the drawing back.  
Razia asked, "You know what it is?"  
"I think so." Essa shut her eyes, trying to conjure the image she'd seen. "It's a network."  
"There are thousands of these installations," Nerai said. "More, even."  
Essa studied the diagram again. "What are these markings? I didn't notice them during the meld."  
"I'm trying to figure out where we are," Nerai said.  
"You mean, you don't know?"  
Nerai shook her head. "I have an idea, but it's a bit of a logic puzzle." She pointed to some of the markings she'd made. "The boxes all represent star clusters. The circles inside them are individual systems." She pointed to one circled in red. "This one here appears to be Parnitha, judging by the number and position of nearby stars." Nerai paused for a moment, and bit at the little black mark on her hand. "There's a problem, though. There are at least two other clusters that could be Parnitha."  
"So you're not sure, then?"  
Nerai shook her head. "I've spoken to the navigator. She tells me we might be able to get a fix on our position with observational data from here and perhaps one or two other systems."  
"And you know how to make the installations work?"  
"We've known how to do that for a while," Razia said. "The problem is inputting a specific destination."  
Essa was quiet as she studied the diagram again. If fuel and food weren't a limitation, they could easily spend the rest of their natural lives jumping from destination to destination and still never make it home. Someone called for Razia over the intercom. She unbuckled from her seat and pushed out of the compartment.  
"I gather this is only a small fragment of the network?” Essa said finally. "I count seventy installations here."  
Nerai nodded. "If we knew where we were going, we could determine quickly where we are. But if we can't decide beforehand where we're going..." she stopped and held up her hands.  
Nerai pulled herself out of her bed. She'd recently been taken off all the pain medication, and had asked permission to dress her wounds on her own. She looked at the scabs on her neck and began smearing on a layer of ointment. The wound on her cheek had stopped bleeding, finally, but it still looked bad. The burns were healing nicely, though; there was only a little scarring along her collarbone so far.  
Essa waited for her to speak again, and when she didn't oblige, Essa said, "I saw something during the meld."  
Nerai went on rubbing in the ointment, almost as though she hadn't heard.  
"I know about Denni.”  
She'd seen everything, of course. The two of them grabbing onto each other’s hands in the cockpit as the acceleration finally eased and the restraints let them go, the embrace that later became much more intimate, and that Nerai, as much as she didn't want to, for as long as she'd taught herself to go through life without any kind of attachment, had yielded more than she ever had.  
Love, Essa thought, has a way of sneaking up on you like that. And now Denni was dead, and there wasn't anything to say, except that they'd given her all the proper rites, and unofficially named the planet after her.  
Nerai had finished with her wounds, though the black mark on her hand that looked more like a tattoo than anything else, seemed to be bothering her. She pushed herself over to the far side of the bay where a machine dispensed a little liquid that she sucked from a tube. Nerai strapped herself back into the bunk and squeezed her eyes shut.  
"Does it hurt?" Essa asked.  
"It's for anxiety." She picked at the scabs on the backs of her hands. "Ever since I got back," she said, "I've been having this terrible feeling that something is coming for us."  
"Are you worried about the ship?"  
Nerai said, "It could have destroyed us. It could have destroyed the Nixia."  
"And you're sure there was no other crew?"  
Nerai shook her head. "Not that we could see. Just those things." She paused to cough and bite at the burn on her finger, then went on, "I got a good look at the severed arm. There was flesh on it, but inside were wires, and tubes. I threw it belowdecks as soon as I had a chance."  
"What do you make of it?" Essa asked.  
“No idea,” Nerai shrugged.  
Essa turned back to her board and said, "You know, the more I think about it, the more I think we were allowed to escape. Even if they made a pretty good show of trying to stop you, if that was their intention."  
Nerai agreed. "All the same, they weren't able to prevent us from launching. The ship was easy to fly. All the controls seemed to adjust themselves to our understanding."  
"And yet you crashed."  
"Well, there was something that wasn't right. Every few hours it felt like something was trying to take control of the ship. The power would go out, then come back on, and the ship would reorient itself. We figured out how to make it stop eventually. Denni followed a power conduit out of the control deck into something that looked like a navigational computer below decks. We had a few tools, and we pried part of it loose. That seemed to make everything better. Until we reached the upper atmosphere. The ship pitched down and suddenly we were coming in too fast. We almost skipped off and back into orbit. Then I regained control - not enough, in the end."  
"I'm sorry," Essa said.  
Nerai looked away. Sorry wasn't quite what she needed. She pulled the straps on the bunk tighter around her body.  
"We got to you as quickly as we could.”  
"I know," Nerai said.  
"For what it's worth, I think it meant something to Denni to know she was with her sisters when she died."  
"I know," Nerai said again.  
Essa touched her shoulder and said, "I'm confident in you. You are going to help us find our way home."  
"If you say so, Captain."  
#  
Razia was looking at a copy she'd made of Nerai's map when Essa found her in the cargo bay. The two technicians were bent over their terminals, studying a long section of code. According to Razia they were close to finding the instruction set that would allow them to pick their destination the next time they used one of the installations.  
"We'll need some data points," she said.  
"Meaning we'll be blind when we use this installation again?" Essa asked.  
Razia nodded, and Essa said, "Better we get started now. Orie's done feeding the crew."  
"We'll manage navigation from down here," Razia said.  
"I don't like it. That didn't turn out well last time you did it."  
"All of our hardware is down here.” Razia gestured toward the panels and the array of redundant guidance computers they’d brought with them. "I suppose we could spend a few days moving it to the flight deck."  
Essa closed her eyes. Razia had found a way to get back a little power for herself. Fine, let her have it, she thought. "All right. I'll give the order." She was already in the cargo bay hatch, and her hand on the comm. "All hands, all hands," she said, "Secure the ship for acceleration. Five minutes."  
Neela was waiting for her at the hatch of the science deck, but Essa gave her a look that said her concerns would have to wait. "Get your teams secure.”  
Neela started to say something, but shut her mouth and turned to the crew.  
On the flight deck, the helm, navigation, and sensors operators all looked panicked. Helm gave the engines hot signal before turning again to face her controls. Essa tried to give them all a reassuring look, and buckled herself into her seat as though it were all routine, but then the sensors operator turned to her, “Captain, we have a contact."  
"Show me."  
"On your screen now."  
And there it was, the thing she'd seen before, like a triangle stretched out long, but not only stretched, but curved. At the base of the triangle there seemed to be an array of antennae. There were about twenty images in all that seemed to show the object revolving slowly around its axis.  
"How long ago?" Essa asked.  
"Two minutes. It's about ten million kilometers away. It's definitely a ship."  
"How can you tell?"  
The sensors operator showed her an orbital projection. "Under no thrust, it should have stayed on this path." She circled a yellow line on the display. "Instead it's here. It's accelerating."  
"Trajectory?"  
"Intercept, perhaps less than an hour."  
"We'll be long gone," Essa said.  
Helm said, "All crew reporting in secure."  
"Right," Essa said. She looked over the ship status panel, then hesitated a moment. Sometimes it was good to listen to your ship, in that quiet moment before a burn. All sounded well.  
She gave the order, and the Nixia slipped forward, gently at first on the first thrust of the burn. Soon it had become hard to breathe. After another minute the installation had doubled in size in front of them. Over the radio came a familiar pulse of noise, a low rumble that the ship seemed to answer with a set of its own sounds.  
From down below, Razia reported in, "We're in contact with the installation."  
"Was it like this last time?"  
"More or less."  
"Sixty seconds to contact," Helm said.  
Razia responded, saying, "We have the helm. Stay off the controls until further advised."  
"Understood," Essa said, as the acceleration pressed her down into her seat. The installation loomed, massive, in front of them, the little blue star held in place by the two revolving rings, and as they approached the ship seemed to bounce, and then there was a terrible noise and a flash of light, and the sensation that Essa was no longer in her body and the ship no longer around her, and in another instant they had passed through the storm and come through the other side. The Nixia's engines were no longer burning, and the ship drifted forward on its momentum.  
Helm rotated the ship along its axis through a full circle so the sensors operator could get a brief view of the space surrounding them.  
Essa picked up the intercom and spoke, ”All stations, report in.”  
"Engineering. All systems reporting normal. Doing manual inspection now."  
"Science deck, systems normal."  
"Cargo bay," Razia said. "It looks like there was a power spike in the antimatter containment unit. We'll need to purge it and start collecting again."  
"Understood," Essa said. "How soon before we can be underway again?”  
"No more than a day, but that's not the real problem. There's a charge building up inside the probe's drive core. We need to find a way to get rid of it."  
"Get to work on a solution. Neela's team will help you."  
"Roger, Captain."  
Meanwhile the ship had spun through two slow circles now, once horizontally and once vertically. The installation was receding behind them. About a million kilometers starward from their current position, a massive gas giant was orbiting at the edge of a proto-planetary disk, whirling in a spiral of dust. Kilometer and larger sized objects were everywhere, though they all seemed to be moving along similar vectors to the Nixia, so immediate maneuvering wouldn't be necessary.  
Everyone on the flight deck had stopped to stare at the planet. It was beautiful.  
"It must be an extra-stellar capture," the navigator said. She pointed to the way the planet's axis seemed to be tilted at a sharp angle to the ecliptic. Essa counted three storms, giant brown-black holes in the planets atmosphere, each one big enough to swallow Thessia whole, raging across the planet's day side.  
She spoke into the intercom. "Neela, we have an interesting object for you and your team." To Helm, she said, "Keep us pointed at the planet for the moment, but maintain our current vector."  
"Aye, Captain."  
"Permission to go below, Captain." This was Navigation. "We'll get better measurements from the large telescope."  
"Granted. Send the third watch operator up to take your place."  
Navigation saluted and disappeared down the companionway. A meteorite streaked through the atmosphere of the gas giant. Meanwhile, far off in the depths of the dust cloud, the light of a distant star flared orange and brown.  
#  
The XO relieved Essa when second watch ended, and Essa went below to the crew deck to chew on a few of the dried berries and to fill her pouch with tea. Orie had finished cleaning for the day and had pressed herself, as she often did, against the cushions of the ceiling. Usually Essa found her dozing or reading something on a little screen she carried with her, but today she had her hands over her face and her back turned to the main compartment.  
"Everything all right, Steward?"  
Orie moved so abruptly that she seemed to fall off the ceiling and down into the room, her head oriented toward Essa's feet. The arrangement might have been comical, perhaps at another time. She wiped her hands over her eyes and said, "Captain... I, I'm sorry." Droplets of water clung to her hands.  
"Is there something wrong?"  
Orie shook her head. Too many things, her expression said. She had pushed herself off the floor pads and was in a standing position now.  
"Come talk to me if you have any concerns," Essa said, and turned to leave. She was nearly at the companion way when Orie, still wiping her eyes, stopped her. In microgravity, tears didn't run away from the eyes, but pooled there. Essa had a washcloth she kept in her pocket that she handed over to the Steward.  
"Thank you, Captain,” Orie said. When she had wiped herself off, she explained, "I'm worried about Nerai. She came up to the crew deck during the third watch, and she just... she doesn't seem like herself."  
"How so?"  
"She's not well. She says she can't sleep, even with the medicine she's been getting. Says she's always sick to her stomach, but can't stop eating."  
"I was just going to check in on her."  
Orie nodded. "I made this for her." She handed over a pouch of tea, and a container of something that looked like chunks of bread. "I'd been saving those for later, but I thought she might like them. They're sweet."  
"I'll see that she gets them."  
Essa went down to the science deck, where she found Neela, Razia and Nerai stationed around the navigator, who was repositioning the telescope. Essa handed over Orie's package, and Nerai moved to the far end of the compartment where she began eating.  
"What's our status?" Essa asked.  
"Well, we're not at Parnitha," the navigator said. A nervous chuckle went through the compartment. She'd been running a search program looking for a number of pulsars with known radiometric frequencies, which made them act as effective navigational beacons. She'd been at it for close to six hours now.  
"We've got two," she said. "BR-89G and BR-9007F. They're not our preferred beacons, but they are the ones I've been able to identify. That should be enough to fix our position, but I'd like a third, preferably not in the same sector of the sky."  
They sat watching the telescope pan across the void. Nerai told them she was going to lie down, and disappeared off toward med bay. Another hour went by and then the telescope pinged. There in the center of the frame was their third pulsar. They waited while the computer sorted through the electromagnetic spectrum, looking to match its signature with one from the database. That, too, took a long minute.  
The navigator moved away from the telescope and went over to a panel with her star charts. Over her shoulder, she said, "Captain, this could take a while."  
"Understood, Lieutenant.”  
Essa motioned for the others to leave. Razia said she was going to the cargo bay to see to repairs on the antimatter trap. Neela looked worried. She took Essa's hands in hers and held them.  
"I can't fathom what forces brought us here," she said. "Who would build a path leading to a place like this?"  
Essa pulled Neela closer and said "I don't know."  
"It frightens me to even think about it. And what do you think they might want with us?"  
Essa only shook her head, as Neela's body fit against hers. "Meet me in my alcove. I'll come find you there."  
Neela nodded, though that didn't seem at all like what she wanted, and Essa pushed off in the other direction to find Nerai, who was strapped into her bunk and studying her chart. Essa watched as she licked her thumb and erased one of the boxes and lines before she went closer.  
"Anything?"  
Nerai looked up and showed her the chart. "I've narrowed it down a little." She’d eliminated about half of the star systems she’d had on the original chart. They were closer to knowing where they were, but they would have to jump at least one more time. She shifted under the sterile blanket and stretched her neck.  
"How are you?" Essa asked.  
"Not especially well." Nerai bit again at the blackened flesh of her finger.  
"How is everything healing?"  
"Neela tells me I'll be ready for duty by the end of the week,” Nerai said. "We have to live that long, first."  
"We seem to have evaded the other ship."  
Nerai shook her head. "You were there, in the garden on the first installation. You saw something, too."  
Essa nodded. She had. So had Razia and Neela, and seven of the other commandos. None of them knew what it was. "You think the ship used the installation, before we passed through it?"  
"Isn't it obvious?" Nerai shook her head. "You saw what I saw. In the meld, on the ship. The design, the technology was similar, perhaps even the same."  
"You think whatever built the installations built the ship, too?”  
"It would make sense, wouldn't it?"  
Essa was quiet. Best not to confess her bewilderment, she thought. Instead she said, "But the ship had no visible crew, except for those... things... and they were... what were they?"  
"Maybe they were us, once," Nerai said. "They might have been clones. But I don't know what their purpose was. I only saw them that one time during the ritual, and again during our escape."  
"How do they know our codex?" Essa asked, not to anyone in particular. Her voice was a whisper. Nerai looked down at her hands. She didn't know, either. There was a low beep from a band she wore around her wrist. She got out of bed, and sucked her medicine from the tube, then pushed herself into the middle of the compartment.  
After a minute or two the medicine seemed to work its magic, and a calm look came over her face. She said, "The ship knows. It knows how to use the installations. If it doesn't know we're here, it will soon enough. It seems to know everything. If there were a goddess, that's where she would live, don't you think?"  
"I do," Essa answered. "All the same, if it's that powerful, it could have destroyed us at any time, and yet it hasn't. I suppose we should find some comfort in that."  
"Small comfort," Nerai said.  
The navigator stuck her head through the hatch and told them she had a fix on their position. Essa signaled that she would be along in a moment.  
"Care to join me?" Essa gestured toward the passageway.  
"Let's go," Nerai said. She pushed off toward the hatch but then doubled over. Her momentum carried her forward until she bumped her head against the padded frame of the hatch. A glob of something floated toward Essa, and she realized it was vomit.  
"Are you all right?" she asked.  
Nerai, holding her head, unfolded and faced Essa. There was another yellow globule stuck to her cheek. She had a wild look in her eyes. Orie came bursting through the hatch. At first Essa thought she might have come to help clean, but then how could she have known so quickly? Instead, Orie cried, "I knew it! I knew it!"  
She carefully guided Nerai back to her bunk and strapped her down. "You didn't drink your tea," she said. "You need to drink your tea."  
Essa grabbed Orie by the shoulder and pulled her away from Nerai. The force of the action carried them both to the other end of the compartment where they crashed into the wall. When they'd recovered, Essa shouted "What did you do to her?"  
Orie's eyes went wide. She seemed surprised. "I... I didn't do anything."  
"Then why were you hiding outside the medbay?"  
"I needed to know," Orie said. "I'd thought so for the past few days, but now I'm sure."  
"Know what?" Essa looked back at Nerai, who appeared to be doing better, and was cleaning her face with a wet napkin.  
Orie looked from Nerai to Essa and back, and then again. Nerai shook her head and held up her hands. "What?" she asked, not comprehending.  
Orie freed herself from Essa's grasp and went over to the bunk. She slid her feet into the loops next to the bed and knelt down to Nerai's level.  
"Nerai," Orie said. "You really don't know? The old matron's tale, feed a girl sweets if you want to know..."  
Nerai shook her head though something seemed to be dawning on her. She shook her head again and whispered the word 'no' under her breath.  
“Orie!” Ess had grabbed her by the shoulder. "What's going on?"  
"Captain," Orie said and straightened up. "Nerai's pregnant."


	24. Ambush

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Liara and EDI learn more about the Nixia, while trying to escape from a mercenary company attacking EDI's home city.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Your reviews are always welcome.

Thanks to my editor, RheasHelm.

Ambush

The western tunnel was in bad shape, its ceiling having collapsed in dozens of places over the millennia. Tree roots had grown from above to fill in the space, making it hard to move quickly. EDI had left one of herself behind to defend the tunnel access.

"What can it do?" Alera was asking. She was the only one who was armed, and so had taken up guarding the rear.

"I will detonate my power source," EDI told her. "The explosion may not seal the tunnel behind us, but certainly it will provide adequate warning of the enemy's approach.”

Liara was studying the map, along with some sensor data the shuttle had provided before the EMP blast had gone off. "EDI," she said. "Have any of your other units recovered?”

"Not yet. Most of me is shielded adequately, but many of the units will take some time to reboot.”

Varian was walking behind her. His taller stature and big feet were making it harder for him to walk than anyone else. He asked Liara what she'd learned from the beacon, and she answered as best she could.

"But what do you think brought the colony down?”

"There's really only one possible answer,” Liara told him.

“Sovereign?”

Liara nodded. "It was left behind to monitor sentient civilizations after the Prothean extermination. Every indication is that it must have found their ship, once they sent it out again. Somehow it managed to take the crew captive, and over time, it discovered this place. It couldn't have done it on its own.”

"They were using the relays," Varian said. "Maybe it noticed that.”

"This all makes logical sense," EDI said. "However there is no evidence to confirm any of it."  
"Except that big empty hole back there.”

A bit of dust sifted down from above, and a moment later there was the sound of a vehicle passing overhead.

"Rover?" Varian whispered.

"The terrain is poor for ground vehicles," EDI told him. "Likely it was a low flying dropship.”

Liara reached for the packet her mother had left shoved into the hole in the rock for her. It was a waterproof pouch, and inside she found the insignia for the Serrice guards, along with a data drive no bigger than her finger. It was a more modern device, but still several centuries old. She handed the data drive to EDI, who began reading it.

"Access codes," she said. "I can open the secured files if you like, but if we are captured, it is likely they will eventually be discovered.”

"Can you send them somewhere safe after we've viewed them?”

"Liara," EDI said. "If we are taken captive, chances are you'll be tortured until you give up this information.”

"With the encryption keys in hand, they won't have any trouble getting the files unlocked anyhow.”

"I could self destruct," EDI suggested.

"If need be," Liara said. She gave EDI the codes. "Store them for now. We'll use them later if we have the chance.”

They had entered a long stretch of pipe that had no breaks. The interior was dark but for a skylight that showed through, perhaps a kilometer down the path. Here the roots gave way to stagnant water that was, in places, almost knee-deep. Algae grew everywhere, and made the footing difficult. It had gone quiet and the group moved as quickly as they could, trying to slip past the net that was falling over them.  
EDI said, "I have detected an enemy mapping drone near the entrance to the tunnel. Creating interference now.”

"What are you doing?" Liara asked.

"Sacrificing the body that was guarding the entrance. It will destroy the drone with a small EM pulse, then attract the attention of any attackers before destroying itself.”

Liara nodded. It seemed like the best option. "How much farther does this tunnel go on?”

"Nine hundred and twenty eight meters," EDI said. "There is a cave in at the end where reach the surface.”

"Any plans what to do after that?" Varian wondered.

Liara shook her head. "The area is densely forested. We could go to ground up in the mountains for a while, while EDI repairs her network.”

"My thoughts precisely," EDI said.

"It doesn't sound like a good option," Varian protested.

"Just keep moving.”

There wasn't much choice. After a few minutes they heard the distant sound of small arms fire, followed by a detonation that sent a pressure wave down the tube. Part of the ceiling collapsed behind them. A wall of dust pushed through the tunnel and past the group. They hurried as best they could in spite of the low visibility, until they reached the skylight.  
They scrambled up the rubble and roots and made it to the surface where they emerged into the forest. A few kilometers to their east, a fire was burning in the trees where their shuttle had crashed, and less than five hundred meters away, a drop ship had landed in a clearing. They could hear its engines idling in the distance.

"Keep going west," Liara told Varian, as she stopped to make sure everyone made it out. Liara stood in the mouth of the hole, her hand reaching down for Alera. 

Alera said, "I can hear them down there. They're not far.”

"How many dropships do you count?" Liara asked EDI.

"I detect three in the air. Two more have landed to deposit troops. I estimate two full companies plus a command and support unit are operating in this area. My aerial defenses are powering up again. I'll be able to target them shortly." Just then her head cocked to the side. 

"There's a separate group of attackers within Morrow. They appear to be looking for something." EDI's eyes narrowed.

"What are you doing?”

"I'm going to kill them.”

"No - we could interrogate…"

“Liara." EDI held up her hand while looking away. Her voice was not entirely calm. "They are attacking my home. And you don't give me orders.”

"Understood," Liara said. "I'm sorry.”

When they had moved a good distance uphill, the group found a suitable place to lay up and observe. It was a flat outcrop of rock, covered with undergrowth dense enough to hide in, while they watched the dropships circling the landing zone, periodically shooting at something under the trees. Down below, there were loud detonations inside the forest.

"Recon by fire," Varian explained. “Lazy soldiering.”

"Can you see who it is that's attacking?” Liara asked EDI.

EDI nodded, "No official insignia, though they're wearing gray uniforms. Mixed race units.”

"Minos," Liara said. "Ex-military. Nasty people.”

"Attacking their ships now," EDI said. As she spoke, half a dozen anti-aircraft guns installed on building rooftops began firing. One of the dropships went down immediately, disappearing below the treetops and returning as a ball of orange flame. The two remaining craft dove for the treetops, one of them apparently crash-landing, while the other skillfully dodged behind the low mound of a hill from where it began firing indirectly on the antiaircraft positions with long-range missiles. In short order it had taken out two of EDI's turrets. Two more opened up from other rooftops.

EDI had pulled up a screen that was showing the status inside Morrow. It wasn't pretty. Her defenses consisted of different varieties of mechs that attacked in concert. Massive wheeled gun trucks carried three independently-targeted auto cannons and rocket launchers. While they forced enemies into cover, fist-sized suicide bots raced toward the enemy, some detonating, and showering the enemy with fragments, while others grabbed individual soldiers and tore them to pieces with hooks and blades. Liara watched for a while, then went back to staring down at the city.

A flock of bird took to the air about a hundred meters off their left flank. Varian whispered something like, Did you see that?And then all of a sudden Liara was momentarily blind. Seconds later there was a noise, a rolling thunder, then a boom and a shockwave that, at this distance only rattled the trees.

She turned. EDI lay rooted to the ground as if paralyzed. "They... how could they?”

Morrow had become a tower of flame.

Varian whispered a turian curse, and rolled to his left. "We need to move," he growled. "Right now. Follow me. We're about to get flanked."  
He took Liara's hand and pulled her off the flat outcrop where they had lain down to observe. EDI hesitated, then, after seeming to complete an internal calculation, she followed the rest of them down.

Instead of moving away from the presumed direction of the attack, Varian led them toward it, keeping low. The rest of the group followed his . He scrambled downhill, in the direction of the attacking unit’s weaker flank. 

They would have made it, too, but something moved in the brush on their back left quarter, and then there was shooting from every direction. The treeline in front of them shattered into splinters, and Liara dropped flat on the ground and began crawling toward a hole hidden between two fins of rock.

Bullets screamed overhead, some of them close enough that she felt them tearing hot paths through the air. Then she was in the defile, hoping that EDI and Varian and Alera had found similarly safe places to lay up. The shooting stopped momentarily, then began again. Another pause. A few short bursts, and finally the wet thud of a grenade.

Liara waited. She heard troops moving through the trees, then single shots. Executions.

More unbearable quiet.

Then shouts. The troops were rallying back together. Liara stayed where she was, pressed into the little hole between rocks. She knew they wouldn't overlook her, but if she waited, she might have time to think of something to say, something she could offer, to perhaps keep them from killing her on the spot. A few more gunshots and then silence.

A set of footsteps moved through the forest, hard and heavy, and she heard the low rumble of a Krogan bellowing orders to his soldiers. Liara felt him moving, the Krogan. He was shouting at someone. Get up, you're not hurt that bad, then he seemed to shamble away. Liara closed her eyes. Someone was going to find her. What did she have that a Krogan might want she wondered. All a Krogan wants as much as a good fight is good food, and a good fuck. She doubted they'd let her live much past the last item on the list unless she could prove herself to be exceptionally useful. Which she would do, though it would cost her.  
She had lived through worse, hadn't she? Perhaps not.

The shooting was over. The troops appeared to be searching the bodies of the enemies they'd killed. Liara heard that a detachment of enemies had managed to withdraw in the chaos. Someone moved past her, and then the Krogan's footsteps returned. She felt them drawing closer, seeming to approach in a circular fashion, stopping here and there to speak with someone, then finally moving on to another group, until they finally stopped beside her.

Liara opened her eyes. There he was. A massive Krogan, big even for his species. Two and a half meters tall, nearly a ton of flesh, bone, and armor. One of his eyes had been replaced with a cybernetic graft, a simple but reliable device that would allow him to see until a replacement organ could be grown and implanted. There was a deep gash in his chin that had been sealed with a stitching laser.  
The Krogan hefted his assault rifle and slipped it into its cradle on the back of his armor.

"Doctor T'Soni," he said. "I've been looking for you." With that, he reached down and pulled her out of the hole. A dozen other mercenaries were standing in a ring around him, with Varian, EDI, Alera and one of the other EDI units, all on their knees.

"These people with you?" the Krogan asked.

"They are. And I'd prefer it if you treated them with more respect.”

"You know this guy?" Varian said.

"Know me?" the Krogan fired back, laughing his Krogan laugh, neither cheerful, nor disarming. "Want to tell him who I am?”

"Varian, I'd like you to meet my associate, Arclight." Varian cocked his head to the right, clearly not understanding. "And if you're wondering why I seem confused, it's because he's supposed to be dead.”

"Oh, you're that Arclight."  
The mercenary behind Varian gave him a nudge with the butt of his rifle. Arclight barked, "Show a little respect. I went to a lot of trouble to find the good doctor here. Don't make yourself look like dead weight." Turning to his company, he shouted,"Roll this up. We're moving out in two minutes.”

He took Liara over to where his men had lain out the bodies of the dead: two Salarians, one Batarian, five Humans, an Asari, and two Turians. "Recognize anyone?” he asked.

The Asari was missing most of her face, but with her armor stripped off, Liara saw some tattoos she'd seen before.

"This one's former Eclipse," she told him. "She must be one of only half a dozen that survived ground operations in London. Shame it had to end like this for her.”

"Anyone else?” Arclight asked.

One of the Salarians had been burned beyond recognition. The other was missing both arms. The Turians were in just as bad of shape. Judging by their facial markings, they came from poor families on Taetrus. That, in itself, didn't mean anything. The Humans were all young, probably recruits who had, one way or another, left the Alliance after their first tour was up.

They were, Liara saw, as she straightened back up, almost indistinguishable from Arclight's own company. He, too, ran with a mix of races, though he had two other Krogan with him, and a Drell sniper who was marking his rifle with fresh notches.

"Anything?" Arclight asked again.

Liara shook her head.  
"Good. Burn ‘em."

Two men from his team poured something on the bodies then set the pile alight with their flamers. Most of the group was already on the move.

#

They made better time, even though now everyone was carrying the added weight of an assault rifle and sidearm. Five hundred meters from the site of the ambush Arclight's team had cut a path through the undergrowth using ground vehicle with a special attachment.

Even under the trees, the plume of dust and smoke was visible through the trees. A local weather system was forming in the wake of the blast, and soon it would be raining all along the coast, which would become a wasteland for generations. At a high point on the ridge, EDI stopped to look down over the ruins. Parts of the city were still standing, though fires were burning all over.

"You can't possibly be okay about this," Varian said.

"I'm immortal, Varian, not by birth, but by careful planning. If the city were everything I had, I would be lost. It is not.”

Varian shook his head. "So that's it, you just move on.”

"Whoever detonated the bomb thought there must be some data hive that would weaken me if it were destroyed.”

"Wasn't there?" Liara asked.

"Yes, but it was one of dozens. You do more harm drinking a bottle of cheap whiskey than that did to me. And what I lost can be replaced.”

"Do you think the Alliance might be behind it?" Liara wondered.

EDI didn't answer, but the set of her jaw indicated she was already planning something.

Arclight came up the line, shouting orders at his troops. Liara stopped him and asked, "How did you find me?”

"Your ship got logged by a tracker when it passed through the Annos Basin three days ago. From there, we did a little math, a little legwork, cracked a few skulls.”

"Who do you think hired Minos to come after me?" Liara asked.

"Maybe no one. Looks like they might have been after your AI friend. But then of course we heard through the grapevine that Aria put a generous bounty on your head. I bet they thought they could collect.”

"And I suppose you have a plan for getting us offworld?” Liara said.

"Ship's five kilometers that way,” Arclight told her, gesturing at the terrain. "Came in low from the nightside of the planet. We'll take off as soon as we're loaded up. It'll be after sunset by then. That's the easy part. Hard part is they've got a cruiser orbiting out past the first belt. They'll try to keep us from getting to the relay.”

"What's to stop them?" Liara asked.

"Don't worry your little blue ass. I've pulled you out of worse.”

“I suppose,” Liara agreed.

As they marched toward the southwest, where Arclight's vessel was hidden, one of the Minos dropships flew low overhead. Everyone scattered into the trees, then scurried back out when it didn't return.

"I'm interested to know," Liara asked, after a while, "how you got off Pirin. I assumed you'd been killed.”

"Most of my company didn't make it out," Arclight explained. "A few of the boys and me, we managed to crawl out through the rubble. By then there was nothing we could do but watch the thing run its course. The whole town was either infected or they were fighting off the infected. It gave us a window to save our own asses." He pointed at the backs of two humans up ahead. "They were with me. We figured once the port got taken, it was only a matter of time before the Alliance got involved. Sure enough, they started taking out surface vessels a few days after Arras fell." He spat on the ground, then went on, "So we had holed up in a house. Easy to defend, but not much food. Most of the infected ignored us, so we thought we'd stay there for a bit, few days at the most, to see what was going to happen. Anyhow, things were really going to hell by then, so we held position until a spec ops team landed near us and started killing everything that moved. I got on the radio and called down to them. Said we were coming out, and don't shoot and all that. They stood down.”

"What then?" Varian asked.

"We killed them. Took their shuttle. The rest is history.”

"By the way, I'm quite useful," Varian said.

"Turian spies aren't in high demand.”

"Is it really that obvious?" Varian asked. Arclight shot him a look, and Varian stood to attention.

"Special assistants to Doctor T'Soni, however, are," Liara said. They had come to a crest in the ridge. From there, she could see all the way down in to Morrow, where fires were burning out of control. "I wish I could contact my ship.”

Arclight shook his head. "Don't bother. Minos locked down the spaceport after the EMP. They have another company crawling all over there. Least they did when we were landing. If your crew is smart, they'll have stayed put and laid down their weapons. Hope you didn't have anything valuable on board.”

"How much farther?" Liara asked.

#

As the sun set something shot down another of the Minos dropships, leaving only two for pursuit, if EDI's count was correct, and likely it was. Arclight's vessel itself was a converted frigate, sleek and fast, and capable of carrying a few extra passengers if need be.

Once they'd broken orbit, Liara and EDI sat down to look over the decrypted data her mother had sent. The first document was a long list of names and pictures, the crew of the lost Nixia. Benezia had given special attention to two, the executive officer, First Lieutenant Essa D'Erinia and the Chief Science Officer Dr. Neela T'Lanois, whose service records she'd annotated in extensive detail, though it wasn't immediately clear why. D’Erninia, the records noted, had been commended for bravery on two occasions, when she had personally led teams onto the outer hull of her ship to repair damage, in spite of "mechanical and radioactive" hazards. It seemed the First Lieutenant had come through these incidents unscathed, though she had ordered a several of her own crew into certain death.

She was resourceful, too. During training she had used salvage and spare parts to construct a workable habitat for herself and two other crew when they had become stranded during an extended EVA on one of the outer belt asteroids.

"She was impressive," Liara said. "No wonder she was selected for the deep space fleet.”

"Young, too," Alera pointed out. "One hundred seventy.”

"I'm cross-referencing her known movements, with those of the other key players mentioned in your mother's notes," EDI said. She had that blank look that she often got when searching through millions of records. "That's odd." She sat forward and began drawing a graph on the screen they were using. "A month before her mission began, the Nixia was in high orbit over Thessia. A ferry crew flew her to High Rock, while the mission crew was already on station, well in advance of their launch window. Meanwhile, Razia and a team of commandos boarded a high speed transfer ship, five days after the Nixia departed. They arrived at High Rock around the same time, carrying a small mountain of materials.”

"I don't see the importance," Liara said. "High Rock was at joint science and military installation.”

"Yes," EDI agreed. "It's more of what I don't see. The Nixia departed the station on the fourth of May of that year. She was carrying, as the records note, nearly two metric tons of something only referred to as 'cargo mass.' And the Nixia was carrying additional fuel to compensate. Meanwhile Razia and her cohort disappear from all records on High Rock during the same timeframe.”

"Perhaps from the official logs," Liara said. "She must have left traces elsewhere.”

"She's doesn't appear on any official ship manifests either on or after May fourth, nor does she appear to have logged in to any local terminals, used the library, or temple, or even eaten a meal at the commissary. At the same time, the inventory in the armory shows a number of weapons logged out to Razia on the same date as that of the Nixia's departure. They were never returned.”

"So she just vanished?" Liara asked.

"With an armload of guns?" Alera said, "I don't think so.”

"You're saying she was aboard the Nixia when it departed for Tevura?"  
EDI nodded. "As much as I don't like to speculate, I'd say this is the only conclusion we can make.”

"I suppose it makes some kind of perverse sense," Liara said. "But then that would mean someone knew about the relays and had some understanding of what they were for, before the Nixia departed for Tevura.”

"How many know of the Prothean beacon in the old temple?" EDI asked.

“At present?" Liara asked, "not many at all. Most of the priestesses were killed in the war. And, of course, the beacon itself didn't survive the invasion. The reapers made sure to destroy it.”

"You told me once that your mother had files regarding the temple," EDI said, flatly. "There must be some connection we haven't discovered yet.”

Liara had the sense that something was coming together, and then it went away, like a snowflake in the palm of her hand. Her mother's data must have something to do with government and military operations related to the beacon, operations carried out in order to keep its existence unknown.

Hundreds had been assassinated over the millennia trying to keep the site under wraps. There was even a document in the archives that suggested the workers who had built the Old Temple had died while moving the statue of Athame into place. Ancient accounts of the incident put the number of dead at upwards of a thousand, which seemed considerably larger than would have been necessary to move a statue barely twenty meters tall. Perhaps it hadn't been the statue of Athame, and, most likely, it hadn't been an accident. And yet it was nearly impossible that anyone could have made full sense of the beacon or its contents without extensive knowledge of the Prothean language and its many dialects, though anyone who interacted with it might have learned a little about Prothean culture, or the Citadel, or the mass relays and their ultimate purpose. And, with repeated use, one eventually learned a little better how to understand the data.

"Do you mean to suggest that the Nixia was sent?" Liara asked, "with the intention of interacting with the relay?”

"With the probe on board, they might have been able to use it successfully.” EDI put up a schematic of the probe’s design on their screen. It was, Liara saw, a primitive version of a modern mass effect ship drive.

Liara took a moment to think this over. "Without a full understanding of the relays, it is unlikely that they would have been able to return, even if their jump had been successful." She shook her head. It didn't make any sense. "You're saying that my government deliberately sent over thirty of its best and brightest to die on the other side of the Thessia relay?”

EDI smiled. "Perhaps they didn't all die," she suggested. "The Thessia relay links directly to Tiptree."  
"Meaning, the gravesite you found was one of theirs?" Liara pulled up Dr. T'Lanois's old drawing. Impossible, read the note. "So they landed on Tiptree, and buried one, or perhaps more of their dead, then departed.”

"I've never detected signs of their ship in this system. No debris, anyhow. It is unlikely they crash-landed here."  
Varian, who had been quietly watching their conversation this whole time, finally spoke up. "Even if any of this is true - what's the purpose of all the secrecy?”

"The Prothean beacon is the reason the Asari have always had an edge in galactic society," Liara explained. "But our supposed supremacy was built on a lie, one that proclaims we came by our knowledge all on our own." Varian shook his head, and for a moment he reminded her of Garrus. "And, of course, someone had to be first. Someone had to test the relays to see if they would work.”

"Brutal way to find out.”

"Yes." Liara was resting her head on her hands. She suddenly felt dizzy. "The discovery had to appear to have been an accident, didn't it? Not just finding the Thessia relay, but the discovery of its purpose. Then they orchestrate a whole series of organized tests and scientific experiments, all designed to make it appear we'd come by the beacon's information on our own, as a unified people.” Neither EDI nor Varian seemed convinced, but Liara went on. "The Temple of Athame in Armali was moved from its old location to a new site near T'Lara Gate, right after the third Serrice-Armali war, which ended almost three thousand years ago. The Old Temple was badly damaged in the war, and so moving the statue and all the important relics it housed made sense. As a symbolic gesture, some of the construction materials were from Serrice, and the Prime Matriarchs of Serrice and Armali each laid one of two foundation stones. The next day, the two of them together threw the first soil onto the shrouds of two unidentifiable soldiers, one from each side as a gesture of peace and the end of the war.”

EDI asked, “So you think the Armali Matriarchs decided to share their knowledge of the beacon?”

"There was so much bad blood between the republics," Liara explained. "It was probably the only thing that could put an end to the fighting quickly, and both sides were desperate to end the war. Of course, even then, there were tensions between the powers that dragged on for centuries. But the peace held." Liara paused, looking over the list, and said, "Of course, the Nixia mission was a joint operation. A largely Armali crew and Serrice muscle.”

"Do you think the commandos were there to,perhaps, compel the crew to go through with the mission if they decided to change their minds?" Varian had risen from his seat and was leaning on a tall crate.

"It would make sense," Liara agreed. "There's one thing, though.”

"What's that?”

"The Asari government wasn't counting on the Nixia to return," Liara said. “But I'm fairly certain they did.”

Just then, the interior hatch to the cargo bay slid open and Arclight stepped into the compartment. He seemed to fill the space with his bulk. His one good eye fixed Liara, while the cybernetic graft unconsciously scanned the area.

"I have some news," he announced.

"Good or bad?"  
"Both," he said. "Good is, we're safely away. We caught the Minos ship off guard. Got them with a torpedo. Not a kill, but they won’t be leaving the system any time soon."

"What's the bad news?" Liara asked.

"I've decided to claim Aria's bounty," Arclight said. "I can't turn my nose up at that kind of coin.”

Varian, who was somewhat shielded from view by the tall crate had been slowly reaching for his pistol. Arclight, in a single movement that seemed to be over before he'd even started, had grabbed him by the wrist, and plucked the weapon from its holster.

"Put it away kid," he growled, pulling out the ammunition block. "Maybe you'll live to make smart business decisions someday." And with that, he barked an order and a dozen armed men entered the room, cuffed the four of them, and moved them off to holding cells somewhere in the belly of the ship.


	25. Aurora

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The crew of the Nixia figure out how to deal with a major technical problem, while encountering a few others.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks, as always, to RheasHelm over at Fanfiction.net, for editing this.

A blood test confirmed it: Nerai was pregnant. Meanwhile, her burns had healed and she returned to duty, what little there was for her to do. 

Meanwhile, the Nixia was in orbit over the gas giant at the edge of the dust-cloud. They hung suspended over the planet, ringed in bands of blue and brown and orange. Hurricane-sized storms formed where the bands met. The planet was at the center of a gyre of material. As the gyre fell inward toward the planet, it became narrower and the particles began to move faster, causing them to be sorted by mass. Some day, Essa imagined, there would be an extensive ring system, but now there was only a diffuse halo around the planet’s upper limb that shimmered in the light from the distant star.

The Nixia had been parked here for eight days while the science team figured out a way to dump the charge that was building up in the drive core of the FTL probe. Six days earlier, at the end of her watch, Neela had come to Essa with a plan that was both crude and simple. By stripping the wiring from a set of backup induction generators whose coils of whisper thin copper wire added up to nearly thirty kilometers, they could make a long cable. The plan was to attach a remotely operated maneuvering system to the end of the cable. Once the ship had descended deep enough into the magnetic field, it would deploy the wire to its full length, allowing the ship to dump the charge. Afterward, the Nixia would ascend to a safer orbit, using only its maneuvering thrusters, where it would recover the tether, and an EVA team could stow it on the exterior hull.

Work had begun immediately, and so far the commandos and science team had done a half dozen EVAs just to bring the coils of wire to the exterior of the ship. So far there hadn’t been any incidents involving orbital debris, but Essa and Ensign T’Mera, the sensors operator were monitoring the situation closely. 

While work continued, Essa went below to check on Nerai, who was barred from doing any EVA work because of her condition. Essa found her assisting one of the navigation officers with the telescope on the science deck. They were watching the parent star, which had grown progressively dimmer over the past several hours. The navigator suspected that a massive body was transiting across it, or that there was a particularly dense segment of dust passing between star and telescope. Nerai was biting at the black spot on her finger. 

“You should have Neela look at that for you,” Essa said. 

“It’s fine.” Nerai unbuckled herself from her seat and pushed herself up toward the top of the compartment. From abovedecks, they heard the sound of the airlock’s alarm ringing, as another team went out with another hundred meters of cable. “How long until they’re done?” she asked. 

“They should be finished in another sixteen hours. Provided there aren’t any mishaps.”

Nerai looked away, knowing what that meant. She bit at her finger again. “It feels like there’s something in there,” she said at length. “A bearing or a few grains of sand. It won’t stop itching.”

Essa thumbed the interphone. “Dr. T’Lanois to Astronomy lab.” Nerai rolled her eyes, but said nothing. “We don’t want any more surprises,” Essa said. “Are we clear?”

They were quiet for a moment, and Essa watched the navigator taking measurements of the star. The light that passed through the shifting dust was beautiful. Neela appeared in the hatch. 

Essa told her to have a look at Nerai’s hand, and was about to say something more, but before she could the interphone pinged. It was T’Mera. “Captain, we have a contact.”

Essa said she was on her way, and excused herself from the lab. On the crew deck, she found Orie grinding up another batch of berries. Lately she’d been making them into something that resembled dumplings that she stuffed with dried vegetables from other ration packs. According to her, they had another fifteen days of food before they would have to move to severely reduced-calorie rations. The thought of it gnawed at Essa day and night. They needed to get moving again and soon. 

On the flight deck she arrived to find the three on duty crewmembers studying the same image on their individual screens. Essa sat down in the commander’s chair and asked, “What can we see?”

T’Mera looked up and shook her head. “It’s the same object again,” she said. Drawing a circle around it with her finger, she enlarged the image, but it was grainy and almost impossible to decipher. “I’ve called down to the astronomy lab to have them orient the main telescope to it. We might get a better view, if it doesn’t move too far off its projected course.”

Essa studied the image. There it was, that same stretched out triangle with what looked like a dozen different antennae projecting from its bow. It was almost invisible, a dark object riding along the edge of the brown-orange background of the protoplanetary disk. It seemed to hang suspended in the empty space between two large gyres of material that were being pulled away from the disk and in toward the planet they now orbited. Essa ordered the crew to capture images of the object and compare them to the others they’d seen. 

“You think it’s the same one we saw before?” the helm officer asked. 

T’Mera said she wasn’t sure. “I wonder if there’s more than one.”

“You mean, one per installation that we’ve found?” Essa asked. 

“Well, exactly. Like a guardian.”

Essa shook her head. She pinged Razia on the interphone and asked for an update. “Should be ready to go in less than twelve hours, Captain,” Razia said. 

“So soon?” Essa said. 

“It seems your science team has their maneuvering unit up and running already, so we’ll be able to deploy. They’re testing it now.” 

Essa returned to the sensors contact. The object had moved slightly, toward the bottom of the frame of their image. 

“It’s moving,” she said, “the ship.” T’Mera adjusted her scope. They watched as the ship seemed to move again. “Are we drifting?” Essa asked. Helm examined her instruments and said they weren’t. She looked down at the image again. The object had changed shape or—more likely—reoriented itself, its antenna arrays pointed directly at them. The ship, if that’s what it was, appeared to alter its shape from moment to moment, the space around it bending and shifting as it moved. 

Essa went to her bag to sleep for a few hours before they deployed the cable. When she woke, it was to the sound of the last EVA team returning. They hovered outside the airlock, as they removed their suits, and were nudging each other in an almost joyful manner. The hard and dangerous work was over! They were done and the ship could again begin moving! Essa went up to the flight deck, and ordered the ship to maneuver into position. It was a short burn, more of a nudge than an actual acceleration, and in another hour they were safely stopped at the correct altitude. She called below decks to make sure all sensitive gear was shut down, including the sensor array that was watching the strange object off to their starboard side. 

“Deploy the cable,” Essa ordered. She and the rest of the crew sat in silence on the dimmed flight deck, watching as it slowly unspooled, pulled onward by the maneuvering thrusters they had rigged to it. Meanwhile the helm called out relevant data. “Five kilometers out. Stable, no feedback in the line.” 

At fifteen kilometers they watched the cable jerk suddenly downward, before going slack and then pulling taut again. “It’s the field,” T’Mera said. “Playing havoc with everything today.” Essa nodded and watched the cable continue to shudder downward, as the magnetic field took hold of it. A tremor passed through the hull as the movement traveled up toward the cable. 

At twenty-five kilometers, a spark seemed to shoot from the end. 

“One of the maneuvering thrusters just blew out,” Helm said. We can compensate, but it won’t be pretty.”

Essa ordered Helm to keep going, and soon after an indicator light came on. She then signaled to T’Mera to open the grounding switch. The sensors operator hesitated.

Essa repeated, “Open the circuit, Ensign.”

T’Mera looked up, her eyes wide. When Neela had first proposed her plan, about a week ago now, there had been a protracted discussion as to whether it would be possible to dump their static charge into the planet’s magnetic field. There was concern that if the weather conditions in the planet’s upper atmosphere were wrong, even a small cluster of thunderclouds, could be enough to flip the electrical tension in the opposite direction potentially frying the drive core, or even possibly reacting with their remaining fuel stores, causing them to detonate. Neela had assured them that they had sufficiently accounted for the local planetary weather, and there were safeties that would burn out if overloaded, keeping the charge from passing into the ship’s drive system. Not everyone had agreed, and several of the deck officers had submitted a signed letter of complaint, after evening mess. Essa had noted their concerns, but made certain they understood the plan was to be carried out, no questions. 

Now T’Mera was on the verge of disobeying a direct order. 

“Ensign,” Essa said again, the force of her voice surprising even her. “I’ve given you an order.” T’Mera just shook her head. She seemed paralyzed. “You’re relieved, Ensign.” T’Mera nodded, and unbuckled herself from her seat. “Off my deck, now. You’re confined to the crew quarters until further disciplinary action can be taken, understood?” T’Mera nodded again, and then quiet as could be, disappeared belowdeck. 

The navigator moved over one station and flipped the switch. At first nothing happened. Essa and the rest stared at the cable receding into the distance, then suddenly there was a flicker as a small orb of ball lightning formed at the end of the cable. It grew and grew as they watched, until it seemed to explode below them into a whorl of red and yellow auroras that moved east to west across the planet, in a giant, rolling shockwave that looked like a gauzy curtain blowing in a gentle wind. 

The ship shuddered as some movement from the cable jerked against the hull. Then all was still. Eventually the light subsided and Razia signaled from below that the static charge had zeroed out. 

“Right,” Essa said. “Back us out of the magnetic field and recover the cable.” 

Essa went belowdecks after the recovery operation was well underway to check in with Neela and Nerai. She found Neela stitching the commando’s finger shut. A droplet of blood had rolled toward the tip of Nerai’s finger, and Neela had something in a clear plastic pouch that hovered in the air in front of her. 

“Good that you’re here,” she said, when Essa entered. “It seems our mother-to-be had a foreign body lodged in her finger.” Neela snagged the pouch between her thumb and forefinger, and handed it to Essa. It was a tiny object, the size of a few grains of sand lumped together. It appeared to be made of bone, though there were threads of a metallic substance running through it. 

“What is it?”

Neela shook her head. “I’ll biopsy it,” she said and shrugged. “It could be a fragment from the crash. It doesn’t look like a tumor. Strange place for a cancer to form, anyhow.”

Nerai was sitting staring down at her hand and shaking her head. She seemed horrified. At length, she removed the straps that were holding her to the bunk and pushed off across the compartment in the direction of the hatch. She mumbled something about checking in with Razia, and disappeared into the companionway. 

When she was gone, Essa said, “Is she all right?”

“Her pregnancy is going well,” Neela said. “No complications so far. Of course we don’t have a lot of experience with low-gravity gestation. As far as I know there have been fewer than a hundred orbital and deep space births, so this will be a first for sure.”

“I actually meant her—”

“Her mental state?” Neela asked, interrupting. “She could be better.” Neela moved over to a screen that was showing Nerai’s chart. “She’s been having trouble sleeping. Not unusual for a pregnancy. Or after everything else she’s been through, for that matter. The nightmares she’s been having though—they’re quite vivid. She keeps seeing some kind of creature coming after her. Disfigured asari, she says, with metal body parts.”

“I saw them.” Essa squeezed her eyes shut, trying not to. They’d been troubling her sleep, too, though not to the same degree. “The other asari on the ship thought they were Athame. But there were dozens of them.”

Neela stared at Essa for a moment before she went on. “Nerai’s been afraid that she’s turning into one of them.”

The interphone pinged. The EVA team had completed stowing the cable. It would need some repairs before it could be used again, but that could wait. “We need to get underway,” Essa told Neela. “We can wait to do the biopsy until we’re en route to the installation again.” Essa gave the order to secure the ship for acceleration, and then hurried to her station on the flight deck. 

T’Mera was tucked in her bag, her head facing away from the center of the compartment. She looked as though she were asleep, though her neck seemed to be bent at an odd angle. Essa didn’t think much of it, and instead continued up the companionway to the fight deck. The helm operator was running the sensors package. While Essa buckled herself into her seat, she said that they’d lost visual contact with the other ship while they were dumping their charge and had yet to reacquire it. Essa told her not to worry, and soon they were underway, accelerating at three times the force of gravity. In a few hours they would be in position to interact with the installation again. 

After the burn ended Essa went below to deal with the ensign, whom she found still in her bag. She didn’t respond when Essa spoke to her, and when she put her hand on her shoulder to wake her, a blob of blood leaked from her mouth and wobbled in the air in front of her as it broke free, before being recaptured, and sticking again to the young asari’s nose and her half open eye. 

Essa wheeled around. Orie was in the galley, working on the evening meal, but she came over to help unzip the ensign’s bag when Essa called for her. T’Mera—T’Mera was her name—had stabbed herself with a long sharp piece of metal, using both hands in an upward motion, she’d pierced underneath the breastbone, through the stomach, and into the heart.

Orie helped ease the body into a stable position in the center of the room, where they lashed T’Mera to one of the tables. Orie checked for a pulse while Essa called for a medical team. 

There wasn’t anything they could do. It hadn’t been an immediate death, or a painless one, but T’Mera had done the deed before they had finished dumping their static charge. A body bag came up from down below, and before Essa knew it, cleanup was underway.

Evening mess was suspended for a brief investigation, but there really was nothing to determine, other than that T’Mera had, in fact, stabbed herself to death, and that she had been dead for nearly six hours before anyone had noticed. Essa blamed herself, but in talking to the crew, when it came time to eat, half a dozen different crew members, including the third watch helm operator, volunteered that T’Mera had been struggling for weeks. 

“She said she knew we weren’t going to make it,” one of the lab techs said. “She said she should have died already, and that she didn’t want to linger.”

“Anyone else feeling this way?” Essa asked. Most of the people seated nearby shook their heads, but avoided making eye contact. 

“Maybe,” one of them said. 

They stowed T’Mera’s body in the main airlock, strapping her to a bulkhead while the ship prepared to interact with the installation. They would hold services for her afterward. Meanwhile Essa went around the ship, talking to everyone individually. Morale onboard was low. It was likely that their next jump wasn’t going to improve things. 

Within the hour, Neela had finished the biopsy of the object she’d removed from Nerai’s hand. She showed Essa a dozen thin sections under the microscope. 

“What is it?” Essa wanted to know. 

“All I know is that it isn’t a tumor,” Neela said. “There’s bone there, and threads of metal, thinner than I’ve ever seen. It could be that it was a fragment than got embedded in her hand, during the crash, or onboard that ship.” She adjusted the focus. “That’s not what worries me, though.” She pointed to the screen and said, “See here where the metal curves.” Essa nodded. “It didn’t do that half an hour ago.”

“It’s changing shape?”

“If I didn’t know better, I’d say it was growing.”

Essa shook her head. “We don’t need news of this getting out now. Tell Nerai it was a bone chip, nothing more, and no one else sees the sample or your notes, understood?” Neela gave a nod. “And keep your eye on the crew. Let me know if anyone else is feeling like they need an easy way out.”

“Understood, Captain.”

Neela looked like she wanted to say something, but Essa stopped her. “We’ll talk later,” she said. “For now, secure the deck for our next jump.” The interphone pinged, and Essa pressed her mouth to Neela’s before she answered. 

It was the helm officer, “Captain, we’ve found the contact again.”

“I’m on my way.”

Flight deck again. The object—the ship—that had been following them now filled the screen at each station. Not that it mattered. The thing loomed large, nearly the size of Essa’s fist, in the viewport. Its massive antenna arrays were pointed in the opposite direction, away from the Nixia. As big and as close as it was to them, Essa could still see that it was accelerating away from them. There were no obvious thruster ports, and yet the ship was moving at a high velocity that was steadily increasing. In ten more minutes it had receded to a point small enough that Essa could easily cover with her thumb. 

While the ship was smaller than the installation, it was only fractionally so. As she sat watching, the installation seemed to light up, and a massive bolt of energy passed between it and the object. In another instant the ship vanished into the black of space.

Everyone on the flight deck was silent, and the only sound was the occasional tone from one of the instrument panels. Eventually Helm said, “Two minutes out.”

“Prepare the ship,” Essa ordered. She spoke into the interphone, and alerted everyone to secure for the jump. 

The navigator made her final calculations, and spoke to Razia on a private channel. “They are in contact with the installation. They have control of the ship.”

Essa shut her eyes and took a deep breath. “Systems check,” she said. Everything came back nominal. “Right,” Essa sighed. “Everyone ready?”

“Do you think it will be waiting for us on the other side?” the navigator asked. 

“Only one way to find out,” Helm answered. 

“I just,” the navigator began to say, “I wonder what it wants with us. If anything—”

She didn’t quite finish her thought, because just then there was a terrible noise and a flash of light, and for a moment the world seemed to end.


	26. Victory is a Long Patience

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Liara reaches Omega for a new confrontation with Aria.

Liara’s cell was tiny. Just enough room to stand, and a hard plastic bench that wasn’t quite long enough for her to lie down comfortably. The men who had taken them captive had grabbed her hands and tied them together to prevent her from using her biotics before cutting open her uniform from the back, and pulling out the Solaris wetware amp she wore at the base of her spine. 

That had been two days ago. The ship had passed through one relay, and a shudder in the hull suggested that the drives were warming up for another relay transfer. She’d done the calculations. From Tiptree, Arclight would have to travel back through the Annos Basin secondary, then on to the primaries at the Exodus Cluster. From there, another thousand light years or so would take them to Attican Beta. Which mean that before entering the Traverse they would be passing through a considerable area of Alliance controlled space. What little good that would do her. After Pirin, Liara gathered no one would send the cavalry, even if she could get a message out.

Which might have been possible. For some reason no one had bothered to take Liara’s omnitool. For about six hours on the first day of her captivity, and perhaps as many as ten on the second, she had tried to hack into the ship’s comm systems, and, failing that, to contact EDI, who she assumed must be nearby. Two times she came close to inserting an unencrypted message into one of the ship’s block transmissions. Perhaps they had gone through or perhaps they’d been picked up by the scrubbing software that she was certain lived in the ship’s mainframe. 

Contacting EDI was even less successful. Signals on all possible frequencies had yielded nothing. All other attempts to communicate failed as well, flashes of light, scraping or tapping on the bulkheads, loud singing. Nothing worked. Liara wondered if Arclight had simply had EDI deactivated, given that she could communicate with any other EDI connected to her secure QEC network. Perhaps they hadn’t noticed that she was a machine, and so left her alone. Perhaps there was hope still that they would be intercepted before they reached Omega. 

The ship rumbled again. It was dumping heat after passing through a relay. They were in the Traverse now. No help was coming. 

Liara had finally turned her attention to the last file her mother had sent. Another video of Benezia in her office at the apartment on Armali. It had seemed odd to Liara that EDI hadn’t shown it to the rest of the group, and now she couldn’t ask her why she hadn’t. Liara watched it once, and then a second time right away. It was short and to the point: her mother was sitting in her office. Some years had passed, because the towers from the third western expansion of Armali were already rising in the distance, and construction on those hadn’t started until about five hundred years ago. Benezia was wearing a yellow shirt, and dark blue trousers. By now she was no longer on active duty with her combat group, and had shifted her interest instead to political infighting between some of the matriarchal groups. 

Benezia looked straight into the camera. Without speaking she projected onto the screen the schematics of a small interstellar probe. On closer inspection, Liara saw that there was no space for any crew. There was a second schematic that showed how the simple craft could be mounted into a ship. Fed by an alternate power source, an interplanetary ship’s reactor for instance, the probe could be repurposed to interact with a mass relay as handwritten notes in the margins of the second schematic explained. Liara noted the script, and moved on. 

Benezia pulled back again, and held up photographs of a planet. “These are the first known images ever taken of a world external to the Parnitha system. This is Niacal.” She flipped to the next, and said, “Kraila, and finally Egalic. These were imaged by a probe named Venturia 1, originally sent to the Orisoni system roughly two and a half millennia ago. It was to have been recovered by the Nixia. Neither it, nor the Nixia, ever appears in any written record after the Nixia disappeared. How do I have these images then?” Benezia paused to smile and tilted her head to the side. “And how do I have this?” Here she held up another image of a planet. She went on, “This planet is not in the Orisoni system. It’s about a thousand light years away from Thessia, and located on a channel not often used by the Thessia relay. I’ve been there, but I didn’t take this picture. This image is twenty-five hundred years old. Someone brought it back for me to find.” Putting that one down, she held up another, this one of an elongated object. Liara squinted at it, but Benezia put it down too quickly for her to see. Liara spooled back and froze on the image. It was small enough that it could have been an artifact in the video. She stared at it for a while before finally moving on. 

Benezia put the images face down on her desk. She put the revised image of the probe up again. Then, over that she superimposed a second image, of a small interplanetary research vessel. The asari had built nearly two dozen of them during the first expansion throughout the Parnitha system. In the overlay it was clear that the probe modification schematics had been meant for the cargo hold of the research vessel. 

“The Nixia vanished without a trace,” Benezia said. “Now I know why. But it doesn’t explain why every so often I come across images like these.” Benezia looked down at the wooden top of her desk and then at the ceiling. “It’s almost like someone left them there for me to find.” She shook her head. “I’m growing weary of the search. I don’t know if I have it in me to finish, but there’s no one else I can trust to complete the task. Except for you—whoever you might be.” Benezia sighed. For a moment she looked as though she were about to turn off the camera, before she leaned back and said, “I know that the Nixia survived its initial encounter with the Thessia Relay. What I don’t know is where it went after it arrived at the planet surveyors have marked as PR-1078-B. I’ve been to four-dozen systems over a century looking for evidence. Now I’m back in the archives, where I’ve found reference to a system in the Exodus Cluster. I’ll go there, as soon as it’s safe.”

Benezia hesitated, then her face disappeared and was replaced with several other documents detailing procurement for the Nixia’s scheduled mission. They’d been carrying nearly a week’s worth of extra food and water. With a little rationing they could have lasted as long as six months, and this was provide that they never found any other sources of food. Liara thought of Tiptree, and the corpse EDI had unearthed there. If the Nixia had arrived at Tiptree, they could have foraged food and water to last for a while. They could have survived for years, if they had stayed put. 

Benezia’s face returned. “Thessia Prime links to forty nine other relays. The relay at PR-1078-B links to hundreds of systems. There is no sign of the Nixia in that system, though it’s possible it could have crashed into one of the two gas giants in the outer part of the system.” Pointing to the documents on her desk, Benezia looked up and said, “I am more than certain that the Nixia must have passed through the system. Where they ended up is not so much a matter of tracking where it went, but in learning how it was again found. There are three possibilities. The first is the crew died, and the ship was eventually discovered adrift in a system visited by later generations of explorers. The second is the crew found a habitable planet with potable water and edible plants and animals and set up an existence there. The third is they returned after a time of wandering across the galaxy. In all three cases, the ship and its mission were covered up, for reasons which I cannot begin to fathom.” Benezia paused and sighed. “I’ve compiled a list of systems visited by the asari scientific fleet in the century following the first official transit through Thessia Prime.” A file opened on Liara’s omni tool that listed potential planets. Strangely enough, one of them was the Earth. Liara shook her head.

“When it’s safe,” Benezia went on, “I will leave for Exodus. Expect to find my next file there.” Now the image disappeared, leaving Liara in her empty cell again. She tried contacting EDI again. Still nothing. 

Liara watched the video once more, not looking for clues, but just to see her mother. Benezia had always been a mystery to her. Now she understood a bit more why: Liara was a late child, born after centuries of chasing ghosts. Liara wondered whether Benezia had ever found what she’d been looking for.

There was another rumble in the ship. Accelerating again, in preparation for travel to another relay. She didn’t have much time left, perhaps a day or two at most, before they were on Omega, and from there it was a certainty that Aria would have her killed. Best to accept it, she thought, then wondered if all the people she herself had sent to die had spent their final hours this way, too. In despair, hoping for some kind of salvation that would never come. 

No doubt some had. Others had probably tried thinking of a way out. They’d been no more successful than the ones who had fought back, or who had simply waited and then calmly faced their end. 

Liara lay down on the bunk and slept for about an hour. When she woke, she was thinking of the Nixia, of her captain, looking out through their narrow viewports at a new world. It was a shame, she thought, that the quest to discover the fate of the ship and its crew would die with her. So many secrets and mysteries would, what did one more matter?

Not much, she thought as she pressed her head against the hatch of her cell. Outside there were guards moving around. Probably they were bored. Probably they were poor. Sometimes money could motivate them to be less careful with a lock or a set of handcuffs. Not this time. 

Even if she weren’t aboard a ship, Arclight’s men were a tight unit. Small and lean. Never more than company strength at any given time, in part because they did specialized work, and they were unified by a mixture of fear and love and awe for the massive krogan. There would be no bribing her way off the ship. Perhaps she could save the others? She banged on the door to her cell. No one answered. A tray of food appeared at the usual interval. 

What Liara wondered now, though, was how Arclight had persuaded Minos to attack Tiptree. Even a casual analysis of EDI’s defenses would have signaled certain failure for any operation. 

Somehow this all tied back to Councilor Deniri. Worse, though, was that it meant one of her own crew had betrayed her. Another thing to wonder about as she went to face Aria. How many hours did she have left, anyway? Liara had lost count. 

But it felt good to let go, and for the first time in years she felt safe enough to retreat into a memory from long ago, of her mother working in her office, late into the night, and finding her recording a message much like the one she’d just seen. 

#

A day had gone by, according to the omnitool’s internal clock. The ship made more noise, and then noticeably slowed down. More noise in the corridors, boots and hatches. They had arrived.

About two hours later the door to her cell opened, and Liara found herself standing, her clothes still torn down the back, in the blinding light coming from outside her cell. Someone grabbed her and pulled her out into the corridor. Metal handcuffs clamped her wrists. There were others standing there, but blind as she was she could only see their feet. One was turian. So at least they hadn’t killed Varian yet. That was something. 

They marched her out of the ship and into a landing area, where they stood screened by tall crates. A shuttle was waiting, and rough hands shoved them in from behind. A trooper came and buckled them in, before taking a seat by the far exit. In seconds the ship was in the air and flying away from the docks. 

Varian and Alera were sitting across from her. EDI was next to Liara. 

“I assume you had a good flight?” Varian asked. “Not too bumpy? Any decent in-flight entertainment? I was stuck with old war vids myself.”

Alera told him to shut up. Liara nudged EDI with her elbow. “How are you?” she whispered.

“I’ve been—communing with myself,” EDI said. “I find spirituality is a help in times like these.”

EDI tented her fingers and made like she was praying. Liara nodded. The shuttle banked hard and made a low turn over the twisting streets of the neighborhood just beyond Afterlife. It dropped quickly and landed almost directly in front of the main doors. The soldiers to the left and right of Liara’s group got up and shoved them out into the street, then hustled them up the stairs through the main doors, while people standing in line to get in gawked.

The club itself was empty, except for the bartenders wiping spots off the glassware before the start of their shift. Aria appeared in the opening of her command center. With a gesture they were shoved down a flight of stairs and into an unlit corridor. More shoving, legs and arms bumping in the dark, then green light and a long flight of stairs leading up. 

Liara gasped. She’d seen this place before, though not in person. One of her agents had been wearing a recording device when he was captured by Aria. Tile floors. A chair with buckles and straps. A rig for suspending victims by their wrists or ankles. And an exit port that led straight to Omega’s waste disposal system. They were on their way to Aria’s kill room. 

Liara’s agent had lasted all of fifteen minutes in there. He hadn’t really known anything of value, just his own assignment, and his immediate contact who was not on Omega, and so out of Aria’s reach. 

Now she had reached the top of those same stairs. It was about as Liara had expected, except that Aria was there, a pistol on her hip. She and Liara exchanged a look. Standing next to her was Mason. To their right, a group of batarian thugs dressed in protective clothing. These men didn’t wait for everyone to enter, but began grabbing the prisoners as soon as they entered, throwing them up against the wall and hooking their metal handcuffs to steel rings embedded in the far wall. Varian struggled. Everyone else seemed resigned. Liara heard human sobbing. It had a particular sound that she remembered so well from her time on Earth, and had hoped never to hear again. Leaning forward, she saw that Letha and Drummond had also been taken. 

It was certain, then. Arclight and Minos had been working together. 

They did Letha first, drawing blood into a vial and scraping off a patch of skin from her scalp. 

“How much did this cost you, Aria?” Liara asked. 

Aria held up a hand for the men to stop. “Excuse me?” she said. 

“You’ve obviously gone to great lengths to find me and my associates. Paying Arclight to betray me, not to mention that sham Minos operation.” Aria shook her head but said nothing. Instead she motioned for the men to continue. They dragged Letha off the wall and through a door into another room. A brief scream and a shot, followed by silence, and more sobbing from Drummond.

She was next. Liara watched the needle go in. The skin and hair samples going into glass containers. When they’d finished, two of them unhooked her from the wall and began dragging her toward the back room. 

Drummond and Liara both shouted for them to stop, but then Drummond was through the door. A moment later she cried out and there was a single pistol shot, and after that a hollow quiet, marked by the sound of Varian and Alera all fighting against the metal hooks on the wall. 

“How much are you getting to kill me and my team?” Liara asked again. 

Aria fixed Liara with her gaze and said, “Not a damned thing.” To the batarians she said, “Continue.”

Alera was next, and finally Varian. There was a sound from the back room: the waste pipe’s valve cycling open and closed. The room filled with an unspeakable odor. Even Aria seemed to pale a little. 

Liara turned to Mason. “I suppose you think you’ve won?”

“Haven’t I?” he asked. 

“Aria will turn on you the first time you cross her.”

“And you wouldn’t?” Mason said. “I only barely escaped your people.”

“If you got away, it’s only because I let you.”

Mason shrugged. “You two sound a lot alike,” he said. 

Aria pointed at EDI. “Her next,” she said. The batarians approached her. At that moment, EDI pulled her arms free of their restraints and charged the men. The first she took down with a pulse of light that burst from her palm. The second she shoved back against the wall. The others came at her, firing their weapons. Aria grabbed Liara and dragged her, still cuffed, through the back room, where the floor was covered in a mix of human, asari and turian blood, and then into another dark passageway. Liara turned around to look back. Part of EDI was glowing orange, as though she were about to melt, then there was a flash of light, the air turned to stone, and Liara and Aria were thrown to the ground. 

# 

Liara came to a few moments later. Aria already had her hand and was pulling her along the floor. The ceiling, what was left of it, was covered in roaring flames and smoke. “We need to move,” Aria said as the fire boiled over the top of them. “Stay low.”

They crawled back toward the kill room, to a place where the floor had given way, and slipped through to the level below. The ground was covered in sludge from the waste pipe, and bodies and parts of bodies. There wasn’t as much smoke here, but when Liara tried to stand, she realized she’d broken her ankle. 

Aria grabbed her arm and dragged her down another flight of stairs. Here they were in the upper levels of Afterlife, where some of the dancing girls and other staff who couldn’t afford to go elsewhere lived. Some were poking their heads out of their shabby quarters. 

“What’s going on, boss?” said a young turian. 

“Nothing,” Aria told him as she dragged Liara past. “Get ready for your shift, Nestor.” The turian nodded and withdrew. 

They passed through a dressing room, full of panicked asari and female humans, too afraid to leave their seats. 

There was another corridor, this one short, and it led to a landing behind the structure that held Afterlife. Defense turrets stood at either end, both of them active and targeting—though not firing on—a number of vehicles moving in to provide assistance. 

“You start trouble every time you come here,” Aria told Liara and threw her to the ground. Liara tried to stand, but Aria came close and eased her back to the ground. “Don’t,” she said. “Your leg is broken.” 

Aria touched something on her omnitool and a hidden panel in the ground slid open. A lift brought an inconspicuous looking vehicle to the platform. Aria opened the door and pushed Liara into the driver’s seat. Once Liara was belted in, Aria pressed a command switch on the main console, and the doors began closing. Aria stepped back and watched from a few meters away.

Liara pounded against the glass. “What are you doing?” she shouted, but Aria only turned away and without any hesitation went back inside. Liara saw something move in the passenger’s seat, and realizing it was a medical drone, leaned back. It gave her a dose of medigel, and after a moment, she passed out. 

#

She woke again in the warm afterglow of the medigel slowly wearing off. Her head was resting against something soft, and she was comfortable, though the place she was in seemed to be moving. A voice was saying her name, and for a moment Liara thought it was her mother. 

She blinked and saw a square of blue light. “Liara,” the light said. Not her mother. Liara worked her mouth, dry as dust, and tried to sit up. A seatbelt was holding her down. She was still in the vehicle. A shape materialized out of the light, and it said her name again. It was Aria. Behind her was a smoke-blackened room. Her face was smeared with soot, and she had a bandage on her left hand. 

“Liara,” she was saying. “Wake up.”

Liara blinked, then startled. “Where am I?”

“The docks,” Aria said. “You’re safe.”

“You could have just killed me.”

“I’ve done better. You’re already dead.” Somoone off screen spoke to Aria, and she gave them an answer before she continued. “Liara T’Soni was killed earlier this afternoon during a failed attempt on my life. It’s all over the news.”

Liara stared blankly at the console. The vehicle she was in had parked in front of a warehouse near the spaceport. There was no one nearby, and the only movement was from the automated loaders that were shifting containers here and there. Finally Liara said, “Who? Who wanted me dead?”

Aria waved her hand. “What did you find on Pirin?” she asked.

“Some sort of parasite,” Liara said. “It was infecting the locals.”

“Have you heard what a mess that’s turned into?” 

“No,” Liara said. “I’ve been out of the loop for about a week.”

“It turns out the entire planet had to be quarantined. No one in or out until further notice. The Alliance has four cruisers on station, ready to shoot down anything that takes off from the surface.” Liara nodded, and Aria continued, “No one knows how the bug got released or where it came from. Except that I do.”

“Are you responsible?”

“No. But I’ve spoken with Mason, who has been in touch with Eldrin. He’s finally traced the parasite. It lives on the skin plates of the leviathan. For them it’s a kind of symbiote, but part of the creature’s life cycle involves other sea creatures that sometimes get eaten by land organisms. Like humans.”

“There are no leviathan on Pirin,” Liara said. “It’s well outside the zone afforded to them in the post war Concord.”

Aria shrugged. “And they claim that they haven’t been on Pirin either, and that someone simply released the parasites there with the intention of causing an outbreak.”

“To what end?”

“Mostly to distract you,” Aria said. “Councilor Deniri knew she could buy herself a few days by having you look into the infestation, while she sorted through the data your mother buried on the Citadel.”

“You couldn’t—how do you—?”

“I am Deniri’s trusted and loyal ally,” Aria said with a bit of a laugh. “She knows that you and I have a little history, and she figured I wouldn’t mind settling a few scores by getting rid of you. You know I almost took her side in this.”

“And my friends and crew?”

Aria stared at the screen. “I’m about the only friend you’ve got left,” she said coldly.

“So what do you know? Why does Deniri want me out of the way?”

“I don’t know much, but Deniri says you’re chasing the same ghost your mother tried and failed to find.”

Liara opened her omnitool and sent Aria the video of her mother. “This isn’t proof, but I’m not chasing a ghost.” Aria watched the video, but only shook her head. Liara asked, “What now?”

“Dock 29 K. You’ll find a freighter there, loading prefabricated housing units. You’ll be happy to learn that the crew is amenable to taking you on to their final destination of Rannoch. After that? Nothing. You’ve got a chance to start over as a new person. Find someone. Fall in love. Get as far away from this as you can.” Liara shook her head. “I know,” Aria said, “But take it from an old bitch like me. Victory is a long patience. Let the galaxy forget your name. Pick a new one. Pick a new face. In the meantime, if you have the audacity to show yourself in Citadel territory, or here on Omega, I’ll have no choice but to come after you.” 

The screen went dark, and the vehicle doors opened. The medical drone had put a cast around Liara’s ankle while she’d slept, and bandaged her other wounds. Reaching into the back of the vehicle, Liara found a long coat with a hood that she put on, covering her face from any cameras that might be watching. There was a small handgun hidden in one of the pockets. Liara checked its battery and ammo block before she stepped out into the street, still limping. She hurried across the street and into a narrow alleyway between two warehouses before she pulled up the map. 

The ship wasn’t far. The walk felt like forever. More than once, she felt herself reaching for Alera’s hand or elbow, as she went. It hadn’t been love, what they’d shared, but it had been something like it, the best she could have done under the circumstances. 

Alera and the rest of her crew, all dead. She couldn’t imagine it. And worse, Liara couldn’t imagine what Aria might think she was owed, for helping her to escape. Perhaps it was time to disappear forever. Feeling the pistol in her coat pocket, she realized there was more than one way to do that, but quickly put the thought out of her mind. 

And soon she was in the port, where there were crowds to be avoided, automated security drones, looking for suspicious activity. Liara walked with purpose, but not enough so to call attention to herself, in the direction of the quarian ship. There it was already, taking on its load of prefabricated housing units, and its captain, a young quarian named Erana vas Rannoch, who shook Liara’s hand and showed her to a cramped but very private cabin buried underneath the life support system. Shutting the hatch behind her, Liara heard two crew members outside shifting a wall panel over the hatch, then welding it in place. No one could get to her here. She was safe. Something she hadn’t felt in a long time. The ship bobbed on its cleats as the loading continued.

She lay down on the bunk. There was nothing else to do but that, and stretching out her long limbs, she realized this little cell had something to teach her. 

Patience, Liara told herself. Revenge. Victory. 

END OF PART I

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the end of the first part of the story, but I plan to continue a new section soon, under a new title. Keep your eyes open if you’re interested. There may be some short pieces about some of the more minor characters in the meantime. Thank you to everyone who has read this far, in particular Red78910 and RheasHelm (over at fanfiction.net), and thank you to everyone who has taken the time to post comments. I really appreciate it.


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